Fifty-seven newly-named fungi—five new combinations and fifty-two totally new taxa—are only part of the significance of Johan Theodor Holmskjold’s Beata Ruris Otia Fungis Danicis Impensa, or Happy Resting Periods in the Country Studying Danish Fungi. The stunningly rendered, impeccably accurate, and beautiful illustrations of each of the seventy four specimens in the two-volume work led Swedish botanist Anton Jahan Retzius (1742-1821) to call it “the most brilliant work which had appeared up to that time”. C.H. Persoon (1755-1837), the father of systematic mycology and himself an author of texts on some of the same fungi included in Beata, considered the work of great value and the illustrations the most beautiful he had seen (Lind 1913).