Giersing's professors at the Academy were in his and his colleagues' eyes out-dated both as artists and teachers. In January 1903 he failed his anatomy examination, and after this it was only a question of time before, like most of the talented artists of the time, he transferred to the so-called free study schools to study under the painter Kristian Zahrtmann. Despite new setbacks and a conviction that training was pointless, he continued until the summer of 1904, perhaps because of parental pressure.
"Ethics are universal and eternal" he noted in 1901. However, this was more of an ideal observation than a properly founded statement of his view of the place of ethics in the real world. Person-ally, he persisted in seeking his own standpoint in philosophical literature and novels and poetry. For, as he observed in 1903: He who learns to discover himself, also learns to discover his form".
Around 1901-02, he launched particularly enthusiastically into the study of Tolstoy's religious and moral writings. What he believed Tolstoy had taught him was to take responsibility for him-self. Instead of being God's collaborator, Man was himself God: "What does the man who has achieved perfection want with God?", he asked rhetorically, concluding: "To be master of one-self is the greatest thing a human being can achieve". However, the supreme joy in life and art was nevertheless "to hear others' hearts beating in time with one's own". Meanwhile, although in 1902 he could write about social problems and talk about becoming an artistic missionary, in practice he never considered seeking to heal and change society or politics as did Tolstoy and many others at that time. Problems were to be solved ideally and privately.
In painting Giersing went on unaffected by all this in the same cautious steps as before, producing family portraits and paintings of natural scenery. Seen as a whole, the early landscapes form a pretty inhomogeneous group.
Until summer 1902 the comments on his pictures in his letters contain no specifically formal or aesthetical considerations. What he had in mind was to capture the mood which was naturally implicit in the light and the weather, first and foremost the gentle Danish summer weather.
After the turn of the century the summer visits to Horneby in North Zealand, which had been part of his childhood and youth, lost their magic. The place stoked his melancholy, but the forest there was also a place of refuge where he could cultivate and reduce his pain in isolation. In a picture of a spruce forest he has with a certain monumentality and romanticism given something of the same longing and atmosphere with which he filled his poems. In 1902 he had felt he needed to travel and experience something new. He must also have recognised the necessity of extending his artistic horizon, for so far he had not been outside Denmark. He travelled abroad in May 1903, his main goals being the museums in Berlin and Dresden, where he made an eager study of both major and minor old masters. In Dresden he took the time to write down descriptions and evaluations of a score of older paintings, focusing in particular on the moods of the pictures and the artists' ability to produce a convincing psychological effect.
There are obvious similarities between Giersing's views on art around 1903 and those of the greatest Danish authority on the history of art at that time, Julius Lange, whose collected writings were published 1900-1903. Lange focused on the motif content of the pictures and the artist's relationship to it, summing up his view of art in his definition of artistic value as "the value which it is revealed through the picture (i.e. the way in which the subject is presented) that the subject had for the creator of it".
In Dresden Giersing had done a drawing of "A Stranger", which has similarities with a curious picture he called "The Strange Man Whom No One Knows". Like a number of more or less symbolist drawings from between 1901 and 1905, it can be interpreted in the light of his experience of himself as a stranger, a man who was misunderstood in the world in which he was placed.
He did not take up these personal themes directly in his painting. There were some strikingly watertight partitions between his various artistic rooms: painting, where almost everything was understandable, delightful and recognisable, the more personal symbolical drawings and the poems, and finally the piano on which he could find an outlet for his sorrows "while the others listened and understood nothing", as he wrote to his secret love.