In his last published text on two tapestries by Aristide Maillol, for whose "rich and gentle charm" he had words of praise, the aggressiveness and the dream of gaudy colours and restlessness has disappeared. Maillol's tapestries were "like a gentle, quiet dream of Greek art in its happiest flowering", and in this lie some clues to an understanding of Giersing's last pictures. Even if he did not, like Maillol, portray women in garden-like surroundings, but sharply distinguished between pictures of Besse and his sisters and, from 1925, pictures from the garden at Valdal, the house to which he moved in summer 1925.
Apart from the sketch for the decoration of the Academy of Sciences and Letters conference room, 1923 saw an end to the black and sombre, monumental, melancholy paintings of the human figure in which the grey ground gives birth to sombre shapes.
The difference between the dark pictures and the paintings of the human figure of the late years, is, however, a difference in nuance. Despite all differences in principle, the approach to the model is still that of minimal ornamentation. However, the way in which this is done, the ductus of the brush, is lighter - somewhat in the style of Matisse's portraits after 1917 and Giersing's own Signac-inspired paintings and watercolours from around 1907-08 with their light strokes and airy, flowing forms. But the introspection of the persons portrayed is not linked to or mirrored by their surroundings, as is the spleen in Matisse's women. In Giersing there is nothing but the figure with, sometimes, a chair or a piece of material behind. The figure floats in space, concentrating on a newspaper, a book, a piece of knitting or something indeterminate that it is impossible to see. The important feature is the figure as an ornament on the surface and its appearance on the canvas, which in the pictures from 1924-26 seems more and more fleeting, perhaps like a vision, a quiet and gentle dream.
"Valdal" in Valby on the outskirts of Copenhagen contained a nursery garden and a large orchard where on the one hand Giersing painted some views of the nursery wing, expansively planned and stringently composed in the style of the country roads and village pictures from Svanninge around 1920, and on the other a series of garden pictures with variations on the same theme, with fruit trees surrounding a flagpole which, slightly to one side of centre, forms a link between the sky and the earth, while everything around it almost disappears in light and colour.
In the family house in Lindevej Giersing had between 1906-07 and 1910-12 painted a series of pictures of the garden, the place where the family sought refuge and the quintessence of relaxed, private security. In Lindevej there were no privileged pictures. In Valdal the flagpole stood at the centre, like an exclamation mark or a full stop. And there was nothing beyond this, only the pole, meeting the eye and dividing the view. The flagpole or exclamation mark is an abstract indicator of direction in a potentially abstract space, and perhaps it can be seen as an expression of irresolution and indecisiveness. For what would happen if he renounced this indicator of direction and otherwise, as he did in the first of the pictures in the series, chose colours almost arbitrarily?
Could it be this irresolution that he expressed in pictorial form in one of his last paintings, the great Self-Portrait in Yellow Smock? In a series of half-length and three-quarter profile self-portraits from the 1920s he presented himself with his well-known defiance and pride or superiority in stance and expression. Self-Portrait in Yellow Smock, on the other hand is not a portrait of the painter engaged in painting himself, but of the painter being painted, and it is not a picture of a proud or superior person. It is a picture of the moment of preparation or reflection, which here is unmistakably characterised by irresolution.
Giersing did not follow the canonic story of the "development" of the modernist. He did not become non-figurative, and he was scarcely en route to becoming it. For him the abstract was not the fruit of a development as it is in the history of art, but of a choice. as he indirectly explained about 1908 in his text about the living form as a decorative stimulus.
Giersing's heritage was completely revealed in the last garden pictures from Valdal, and it weighed so heavily on the whole of the coming Danish generation with its naturalist leanings that, with few exceptions, they hardly ever managed quite to paint their way out of the course that was embodied in them and in so many other paintings before them. One has to be careful of asserting that an art-historical course of development was completed with Giersing. But judging it retrospectively, it certainly looks like it.
Giersing's own pupils were perhaps those for whom it was most difficult. He took on his first pupils in 1912, and over the years, his "school", as it became around 1915, was attended by over a hundred budding artists. It did not become, as did Zahrtmann's school on more than one occasion, the actual breeding ground for a new generation or a new "breakthrough". Giersing apparently did not have any actual pedagogical method, and the pupils obviously represented too much dead weight. So he often talked over the heads of the inexperienced pupils, who listened respectfully and kept their silence, and then, because they saw their teacher as being so great, almost all tried to become little Giersings. Fundamentally, however, the problem was probably that at heart he did not believe it was possible to learn to be an artist. It was principally his poor finances that prompted him to take on pupils.
Giersing was not one of the masters who made it easier for posterity to paint and to become a painter. And it was only granted to quite a small number, Erik Hoppe and Lauritz Harz and one or two others, to approach his style and get away with it. The inheritance he left was, if he was rightly understood, infinitely heavy to bear.