Rudolph Tegner seems to have come about thirty years too late to the party with his heavy symbolism and pathos, a bit like Rachmaninoff. They were both deeply unfashionable, far removed from the avant-garde.

In the 1890s, Tegner lived in Paris on very little money and huge ambitions. In his studio he worked on the colossal sculpture The Great Man, which ended up nearly seven metres high. He was not entirely alone. The sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen had left his owl with him for the winter. By day it sat in its cage and slept, but at night it came alive and had to be fed horsemeat. In time the two became so comfortable around each other that the owl would casually perch on Tegner’s head while he sat reading The Divine Comedy.

In 1896, The Great Man was finished. To get it out of the studio, Tegner simply sawed it into several pieces. The sculpture was later shown alongside the works Our Time and The Future, in which the woman symbolises the Whore of Babylon while the man represents the spirit’s triumph over her tyranny.

Tegner was not especially loved in Denmark. In France, by contrast, he received great acclaim; his grand, pathos-laden mode of expression appears to have found a firmer foothold there. In his memoirs, he concludes with a remark that – all things considered – seems remarkably apt: ‘Criticism has never been able to kill that which is meant to live, and, above all, praise has never made live that which is destined to die.’

His museum in Dronningmølle, in the landscape known as Sibiria, was completed in 1938. It is a monumental concrete building – the first of its kind in Denmark – and was designed by Tegner himself. That the project was realised at all was due in large part to his wife, Elna Tegner, who financed it with money inherited from her wealthy shipowner father. The museum also serves as a mausoleum: Tegner himself is buried beneath the floor, while Elna – at her own request – is interred in the plinth of the statue Apollo.