This atmospheric early 20th-century oil painting by Danish painter Julius Paulsen (1860-1940) depicts a young woman beside a shaded lamp at bedtime. An early photographic record in the Danish archives preserves Paulsen’s original title: Ved Sengetid - At Bedtime.

Reaching across a small table, she extends one hand towards the pool of a green-shaded light while the bedroom around her recedes into darkness. The bed is already turned down. Pillows and blankets lie in broad passages of cream, red and brown, while the furniture and walls dissolve into shadow. Behind her, only fragments of the room remain visible.

Paulsen has reduced everything to the essentials. Light. Fabric. Skin. Darkness. And the brief movement of a woman caught between one part of the day and the next.

Paulsen has handled the light with his usual aplomb. Her pale nightdress receives the strongest illumination, but even here he avoids clean white. Instead, it shifts through cream, grey, yellow and muted green as the lamp catches different folds of fabric.

By 1909, when this piece was produced, he was approaching 50, internationally established and teaching as a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His draughtsmanship was secure enough for him to begin leaving things out. A face could become a few strokes. A bed could become an accumulation of colour. A dark room no longer needed to be described corner by corner. He knew what he was abbreviating.

He returned repeatedly to bedrooms and intimate female subjects during the first two decades of the 20th century. Women often sit upon beds, stretch, undress, prepare for sleep or simply pause within dimly lit rooms. Some are nude, others partially clothed, but they rarely feel like conventional academic models. Instead, they seem caught during ordinary private actions.

This is perhaps what interested Paulsen most. Not the bedroom itself, but what people become when nobody appears to be looking.

Several of these intimate works feature an auburn-haired woman of similar appearance. It's tempting to wonder whether she belonged to Paulsen’s own domestic circle, and his wife Esther Lange has sometimes come to mind as a possible model.

He adopted the title 'At Bedtime' for numerous works and there's something personal about it. It describes neither a pose nor a costume, but a moment everybody understands: the room growing quiet, clothes being put aside, the last lamp still burning before darkness.

Paulsen’s admiration for Rembrandt is also difficult to ignore when considering these works. Rembrandt repeatedly placed ordinary bodies within deep darkness, allowing a sleeve, shoulder, face or length of pale fabric to emerge briefly into warm light. In works such as 'A Woman Bathing in a Stream', the figure is not idealised - simply absorbed in an everyday action.

It's as if Paulsen has taken Rembrandt’s handling of light and applied it to a Copenhagen bedroom.

This painting has an established modern history. It appeared at auction in Copenhagen in 2001, where it sold for DKK 65,000, equivalent at the time to approximately £5,500. The early archival photograph referred to above confirms that the composition has remained unchanged.

The bed is ready. The room is already disappearing. And in another moment, the lamp will presumably go out too.

Signed/dated in the lower right and held in a gilt frame, which is probably original.