Brendekilde grew up in Braendekilde, a small village close to Odense on the island of Funen.

Brendekilde and L.A. Ring are the first Danish painters, who grew up among poor people in the countryside and depicted the true conditions of life in rural Denmark in the period from 1880 to 1920.

They are social realist open-air painters, depicting poor people whether working in the fields or in their houses, showing the tragic sides of life.

Among others, the authors Henrik Pontoppidan (Nobel Prize in Literature 1917) and Jens Peter Jacobsen are representatives of the modern breakthrough in Denmark.

Brendekilde's friend Martin Andersen Nexø represents the popular breakthrough in literature.

Brendekilde was always in a good mood, was deeply committed to paint life in the small villages, and furthermore was an ardent socialist.

Ring was of a more depressive disposition and Brendekilde encouraged him to continue painting and join exhibitions.

Brendekilde also introduced Ring to Lars Ebbesen, who had a farm "Petersminde" in "Raagelund" close to Odense.

[2] Several of Brendekilde's paintings became very famous and won medals e.g. at the World Expositions in Paris 1889, in Chicago 1893 and at the “Jahresausstellung” im Glaspalast in München 1891.

He also inspired painters like his friends Julius Paulsen, Peder Mønsted, Hans Smidth, Paul Fischer, Søren Lund [da] and H. P. Carlsen.

Pontoppidan made use of Brendekilde as a model for the painter Jørgen Hallager – a socialist and a hero – in his famous novel Nattevagt (The Night Watch; 1894).

He is regarded to be the first artist working with glass in Denmark making decorations and forms for the Glassworks of Funen in Odense from 1901 to 1904.

Among others Carl Ove Julian Lund (1857–1936), who made important contributions to the ceramic field.

Lund and Brendekilde also introduced their common friend, Karl Hansen Reistrup (1863–1929), and he became the most important and productive of all the famous potters.

The introduction of L.A. Ring who married Sigrid, Kähler's daughter, was not essential to the production of ceramics but very important to the family and their history which he depicted on many occasions.

This painting is monumental (207 x 270 cm) and in the centre a woman is screaming over a dead man, worn out due to hard labour in the still feudal and poor, rural society.

One of his good, Danish friends, the painter Johan Rohde, accompanied him to the great Exhibition of Nordic Painters in Copenhagen in 1888, when Brendekilde was represented with 5 paintings, among these his large and almost impressionistic Forår (Spring), a painting of a forest with anemones and a young couple and mounted in one of his impressive arts and crafts frames.

In 1889–1891 (probably 1889) Munch made a preliminary sketch for the scream – “ Mann som går langs en vei” – with a lonely old worn out man walking with a stick alone in a road in a flat Danish landscape with trees in the background, reminding one very much of Worn Out.

In Stone Collectors, three persons and an old man stand between furrows similar to the road lines in Munch's sketch.

His inspiration for making these two screaming sculptures in miniature has been a mystery, but he was an apprentice in Copenhagen from the first week in 1891–1892 in the workshop of the Danish sculptor Vilhelm Bissen, who among others was a professor at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Charlottenborg.

Lemminkäinen's mother does not scream, but she is also a sorceress having the situation under control, sewing her dead son together and wakening him to life again.

In this case he illustrates song XV in Kalevala - the Finnish heroic legend - where Lemminkäinen is the young hero.

At The World Exposition, Paris 1889, Gallén had four oil paintings in Palais des Beaux Arts where Worn Out was exhibited.

As a painter of social realism he immediately understood the message of Brendekilde and also realized the double nature of the scream coming from a worn out person or as an omen of a fight reflecting that the persons in Worn Out are heroes like Lemminkäinen and his mother.