Harald Giersing's father was a wholesale dealer. He was used to managing his own affairs, and until late in life he looked with disapproval on his son's life as an artist and the financial irresponsibility that went with it. Giersing's mother belonged to an upper middle class family in whose life painting and artists were a natural part. Her maternal grandfather was secretary to the Academy of Fine Arts and the founder of the Royal Collection of Prints and Drawings, and as a child her mother had been the model for both a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen and a portrait by Christen Købke.
The mother followed the family tradition and the ideals of upper middle-class good breeding and encouraged her son to develop his creative abilities in the spheres of writing, music and painting. He showed early talent as a black-and-white artist and painter, but he was no prodigy. He was also a talented musician. Throughout his life music meant almost more to him than visual art, and he is said for a time to have considered becoming a pianist.
It was about 1896 that Giersing decided that he would be a painter, and if one is to point to possible incentives, the fact that he was at that time in love might have played a more decisive role than his mother's exhortations - for the unattainable young lady also painted. The infatuation deeply affected this melancholic young man and gave voice to his frustrations and longings in a large number of poems and prose writings.
After taking his school-leaving examination in 1899 he spent a year at the Technical School in order to prepare for the entrance examination to the Academy of Fine Arts, which he passed in the spring of 1900 when he also - by agreement with his father - took the compulsory examination in philosophy at the University in order to have something to fall back on. His interest and ability to think philosophically are already from this time documented in his notebooks.
There is a remarkable dissimilarity in these early years and until 1904-05 between on the one hand his powerful emotions, sharp opinions and philosophical flights of fancy, and on the other his diminutive naturalist paintings of familiar and precise scenes: members of the family, the house where they spent their holidays, the charming natural scenery. He could produce holiday scenes such as the family and their friends in a horse-drawn carriage or playing croquet, horizontally and two-dimensionally, as timeless moments. But he had neither possibility nor the desire to allow powerful emotions or private longing to make their way into his paintings except completely camouflaged, reduced and harmonised.