Peder Mønsted (1859–1941) was born on 10 December 1859 at Balle Mølle, near Grenaa in eastern Denmark, the son of a well-off shipbuilder. He began his training in Aarhus under the landscape painter Andreas Fritz and in 1875 entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where his teachers included Julius Exner.
Mønsted became one of Denmark’s best-known landscape painters. His favourite subjects were still water, forests, beech woods and snowy winter scenes, painted with a clarity of light and detail that some critics describe as almost photographic. He also travelled widely: he visited Algeria in 1889 and a few years later Greece, where he was a guest of King George I, himself born a Danish prince.
He died on 20 June 1941 in Fredensborg and is buried in the Garnisons cemetery in Copenhagen.