In the beginning of the 1900s Rudolph Tegner get the commission for the monument to Niels Finsen, the scientist who explored the healing power of light. The monument was originally meant to stand by the Finsen Institute, but was too large and was instead placed at the junction of Blegdamsvej and Tagensvej, close to Rigshospitalet.

Like so many others at the time, Tegner spent some time at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland – the very place that inspired Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. There the doctors told him to take half an hour of sun in the garden every day. It was during one such session back home again – soaking up the sun in his garden in Hellerup – that the idea for the sculptural group Towards the Light arose.

Tegner also turns up in a rather different context: in Epidemic there is a scene in which I myself climb up onto the sculpture and sit on the head of one of the female figures. Incidentally, the figure was modelled on Julie Jensen, who was Carl Th. Dreyer’s mistress.