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     The son of a merchant, Harald Slott-Møller studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1883 before undertaking a three-year period of study with the painter Peder Severin Krøyer as his teacher. He first exhibited his work in 1886 at the annual Spring Exhibition at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the exhibition gallery of the Danish Academy, and came to public attention two years later, when he showed a large genre painting of peasants in a Copenhagen doctor’s waiting room, entitled "The Poor: The Waiting Room of Death", in which a powerful Social Realist commentary was readily evident.

     In the 1890s, influenced by Italian Gothic art and the work of the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Slott-Møller turned from Naturalism to a kind of restrained Symbolism, expressed in poetic landscapes populated by isolated figures of women. He also exhibited portraits, often of well-known figures in Danish artistic and literary circles, typified by a portrait of the critic and scholar Georg Brandeis lecturing at the University of Copenhagen, painted in 1890.

    In addition to painting, the artist worked in woodcuts, the processing of ivory as well as silver, and he devoted himself to the visualization of furniture. His artistic expression was characterized as painterly and formal. The content of his works was inspired by his fascination with the Middle Ages. He created and reinterpreted myths. These were influenced by the artistic vision of the English Pre-Raphaelites, in which aesthetics, ideology and morality were combined. At the end of his work, he mainly carried out commissioned works and painted battle sceneries and genre images.

     The artist’s wife Agnes Slott-Møller was likewise a painter, and both were founding members of the Danish artist’s association "The Free Exhibition" (Den Frie Udstilling), established in 1891 as an alternative to the Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Between 1902 and 1906 Slott-Møller also worked as a designer of ceramics for the Danish faience factory Aluminia, and in 1917 he published a treatise on the importance of spirituality and Christianity in art.

​     in 1907 there was a public dispute over art called, "The peasant painter strut" (Bondemalerstrid) which began with the rejection of one of Gerda Wegener's portraits at both Charlottenborg and Den Frie Udstilling. The dispute stood between art historian Karl Madsen and the Funen artists representing what was derided as "farm painters", against the symbolist artists Gudmund Hentze and Harald and Agnes Slott-Møller representing "capital culture". Madsen successfully defended the Funen artists as "naturalistic and impressionistic with an honest nature", and characterized the capital culture as "backward and reactionary, too decorative and monumental." As a result, Hentze was ostracized from artistic circles and the Slott-Møllers left the art world instead turning toward national politically engaged circles.

     Although Harald was admitted as a Knight in the Danish chivalric order of the Dannebrog in 1919, the Slott-Møllers lived and worked in relative isolation from the artistic scene in Denmark from around 1910 until their deaths, just a few months apart, in 1937.

     The artist is represented in these public Institutions:

• National Gallery of Denmark (SMK)

• National Gallery of Australia

• Detroit Institute of Arts

• Uffizi Gallery, Florence

• Den Hirschsprungske Museum

• Museum of Modern Art Aalborg

• ​Charlottenborg Palace, Denmark

• ​The Royal Library, Denmark

• Ribe Kunstmuseum

• Roskilde Museum

• Skagens Museum

• Skovgaard Museum

• Vejen Kunstmuseum

• Fuglsang Art Museum

• ​Library Bergen, Norway

• Fondation Custodia / Collection Frits Lugt, Paris