Dankvart Dreyer made this drawing of poppies with pen and ink, but we don’t know when. The sketch is small, and its botanical subject is quite traditional, fitting into a long-established genre of landscape art. But the twist here is the artist, who wasn’t meant to be an artist at all! Dreyer had trained for the military, but a chance encounter with the painter Peter Christian Skovgaard changed his life. Dreyer became part of a circle of artists in Copenhagen who aimed to create a distinctively Danish kind of landscape painting, free from foreign influence, in response to the complicated politics of Denmark at this time. Art history can uncover these surprising personal and cultural stories, using sources such as letters, biographies and exhibition reviews, so that we might better understand the social forces that shape art and the institutions that display it.