Niels Ryberg with his Son Johan Christian and his Daughter-in-Law Engelke, née Falbe

The affluent merchant Niels Ryberg is seen sitting under a tree at his most recently acquired manor house. Next to him is his immediate family. The idyllic depiction of nature and the bourgeois family is typical of paintings from the so-called Danish Golden Age of art (c. 1800–1850). The art of the period is also characterised by deliberate omissions: there are no signs of the incipient industrialisation and urbanisation, social crises, lost wars, and the fact that the Danish economy was to some extent dependent on the triangular trade and slavery. The work does not show that Niels Ryberg meddled in the transportation of enslaved people. One of his slave ships was named after his daughter-in-law, seen on the far right. In 1802, the brig Engelcke was loaded with 221 enslaved people on an African coast and sent in the direction of Cuba. Along the way, 50 of them were thrown into the sea. All, the dead and the living, were among the thousands of nameless victims of the era’s industrious trade. Was it just a different time? It is estimated that approximately 50 million people live in slave-like conditions today (50 Favorites in the SMK Collection).