Royal Danish Embassy – Washington, D.C.

Danish art has seldom attracted attention in other European countries. Neither individually nor in schools have our artists achieved anything that can compare with the greatest works that figure in the international history of art. Nevertheless there is a perceptible line of development in the art of this country that reaches its own zeniths. These deserve to be known in wider circles; that they are not so is because Denmark is relatively remote from the main European centers of culture.

Danish artists have been active in Denmark for hundred of years but for a long period it was a matter of only a few individual artists and in no sense a real Danish school of art. This was not to emerge until relatively late at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the Danish Golden Age started.

Early History

The oldest evidence of Danish visual art and handicraft stems from the Mesolithic Maglemose Culture (Approx. 9300-6800 BC). The art materials are bones, and in the years before the birth of Christ, followed by ceramic and bronze.

About the time of the birth of Christ gold became a popular material, and small pendants with delicate patterns in granulation indicates a highly developed goldsmith’s art. The centuries after 400 AD saw the development of the characteristic Scandinavian animal ornamentation, but it was not before the Christian faith and culture took root in Denmark that the visual arts came to reflect the country’s European position.

The Romanesque period in Denmark resulted especially in stone sculptures where animals was a common motif, and showed the lively contact with southern and western Europe. A special group of works consists of golden altars which have survived in greater numbers in Denmark than in any other country. The golden altars consist of fire-gilded copper sheets fixed on a wooden core, and two of them can still be seen in two Danish churches. The Romanesque art was followed by a period of Gothic inspiration, starting in the middle of the 13th century. The Gothic art was far more colorful than the Romanesque art, and often had a far more conventional and local character. One of the greatest Gothic sculptors in Denmark was Claus Berg (approx. 1470-approx. 1532), who brought a southern German style to Denmark, but was forced to leave the country when the breach with the Catholic Church resulting from the Reformation in 1536 put an end to Gothic art.
During the Reformation, king Christian III established himself as head of the national church, and the art therefore became more and more consciously exploited to glorify the kingdom and the monarch’s person and family. During that period the Renaissance established itself in general, inspired by German and Dutch artists. The dominant artistic achievement was the rebuilding and redesigning of Kronborg Castle in Helsingør (1574-86), which attracted a large number of artists from the Netherlands. Over the years the art changed. Christian IV carried out an active art policy and introduced architects and sculptors from abroad to glorify the kingdom. The Baroque art was closely connected to the life at court with all its festivals, and still dominated by foreign painters. This was changed as the first Danish Academy of Fine Arts was established in 1738 (instituted in 1754), and the first generation of Danish painters was born.

The Golden Age

In Denmark, as everywhere else, the con-cept of a national art form first emerged in the years that followed 1815 when each country began to cultivate its own characteristic land-scape, history and folklore. After the chauvin-ism of the Napoleonic wars, a patriotic con-sciousness developed internationally which demanded that its artists should depict every-thing held dear in the familiar environment.

The Golden Age of Danish art is generally considered to run from about 1814 to 1848. It is around the painter Eckersberg and his pupils from the first decade of his teaching at the Royal Academy that the designation “Golden Age” has been built. The Danish painters constituted a brilliant national school but were also part of the international mainstream in the Romantic period.

The Danish painting of the so-called Golden Age is no longer the secret well-kept within native shores that it was only a decade ago. Examples of the Danish school are on museums around the western world but the finest Danish paintings are still in Denmark, mainly in museums.

Thorvaldsen

Although dependent on local tradition and leading exponents this trend took varying forms in the European countries. In Denmark the fact that an academy of art was instituted in 1754 that provided painters and sculptors with their initial basic training was an import-ant influence. Furthermore, Danish artists had received a boost to their self-confidence when their fellow academician, the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) had achieved an international breakthrough in Rome, where the whole of the beau monde queued up to secure themselves one of his works.

Thorvaldsen was born in Copenhagen on November 19, 1770 as a son of an emigrant Icelandic carver, Gotskalk Thorvaldsen, and Karen Dagnes. He came from a poor home and as a child he helped his father carve and soon he became proficient in this trade. He never really received any regular schooling but joined the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1781, as the lower classes were intended for pupils in handicrafts. Thorvaldsen was very talented and soon the painter N. Abildgaard took him under his protection. In 1776 he was awarded with the academy’s traveling fellowship and was able to make a journey to Italy.

Being in Italy became a turning point in his career. During these years he grew to what he artistically became. He modeled the statue of “Jason” almost in desperation but when the great Italian sculptor of that time, Canova, saw and acknowledged its importance, it founded Thorvaldsen’s renown. From that time orders flowed in and Thorvaldsen remained in Rome until 1819. Back in Denmark he was greatly fêted and he assisted in decorating the Christiansborg Castle, the law courts and the palace church in Copenhagen.

Thorvaldsen derived his inspiration from Antiquity, and was the first Danish artist to achieve a place in the history of European art. Sculptures such as “Jason”, “Amor & Psyche” and “Adonis” inspired by ancient mythology, earned Thorvaldsen the nickname “Disciple of the Greeks”. In 1820 he returned to Rome with many large orders and his studio almost became a business of an artistical type where many young artist worked under his supervision. During the 20s and 30s the large monuments which maintain Thorvaldsens universal name and renown came to life. After 20 years concentrated activity Thorvaldsen returned to Denmark in 1838 and his return was a national event of almost legendary character. He continued working in a beautiful studio in Nysø and died suddenly in 1844.

Even after Thorvaldsen had come to be acclaimed as the most renowned sculptor of his day he always gave his unknown country-men a kindly welcome and associated with them on equal terms. Thorvaldsen was widely honored after his dead, not least through the museum dedicated to him, Thorvaldsens Museum. The building of the museum commenced in 1839 to house his works and it was opened to the public on September 18, 1848.

Eckersberg

The painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853) has been called the father of Danish painting and the founder of the study of nature in Danish art. He was by far the most influential Danish painter in Denmark during the first half of the nineteenth century but compared to Thorvaldsen, Eckersberg was famous only at home. However, he was highly admired and respected among his countrymen and his importance as a teacher is unquestioned.

Eckersberg was born in 1783 in Schleswig in southern Jutland, a part of the kingdom that would be lost to Prussia in 1864. Early in life he wanted to become an artist and in 1803 he went to the Academy of Arts where he became a student of Abildgaard’s. From the notes from an autobiography that Eckersberg made toward the end of his life, it appears that it was the simple visual pleasure he got from nature that led him into painting. At that time, however, landscape painting occupied the lowest rung in art’s hierarchy and history painting the highest.  Even though an academic career was thought to culminate in the mastery of history painting, Eckersberg kept his focus on landscape painting.

After attending the Academy of Art in Copen-hagen he made the obligatory study tour to Rome in 1810-13,  via Paris where in 1811 he became a pupil of the painter Jacques Louis David. The French artist had taken part in the great rev-olution of 1789 and had later become a fol-lower of Napoleon, but he did not make a point of forcing his ideological views on his pupils. He concentrated on impressing on them the importance of making a thorough study of nature, above all young artists must learn to see with their own eyes. Voir beau et juste, repeated David over and over again, and in this way Eckersberg learned to see the beautiful and the true as two sides of the same subject.

From David, and later from Thorvald-sen, Eckersberg learned composition and his eyes were opened to the clear and beautiful colors of daylight. In Rome he assimilated his new knowledge in a series of spontaneous and directly perceived prospects of the sights of the city. “View from the Colosseum” (1815) was painted from in front of the sub-ject, large and small details are gathered and ordered into a unity in the small painting, where the viewer looks from the wild flowers and grass of the foreground on past the ruins of antiquity to the ochre walls and red roofs in the background.

After Eckersberg had returned to Denmark in 1816 and was appointed professor at the Academy of Art, it was expected that he would paint historic pictures for the adorn-ment of the royal palace of Christiansborg. This he did, but it is neither for these paintings nor his many altarpieces that he is remem-bered and generally spoken of as the father of Danish painting.

Eckersberg spent his leisure hours painting nature themes for his own pleasure. He did a series of wonderful marine paintings, and he made small studies of woodlands and por-traits of prominent bourgeois citizens of Co-penhagen in the Biedermeier period. Eckersberg worked in almost all genres of his art: history painting, portrait and landscape painting as well as marine painting.

Eckersberg worked at the academy for 35 years but when he grew old his eyesight began to fail. He had to make do with drawing and towards the end not even with that. Late works from his hand are rare but a couple of touching drawings from his last active year are still extant. Eckersberg died of cholera in Copenhagen in 1853, and he was by that time the central figure of the Danish Golden Age.

Copenhagen at that time had no more than 80,000 inhabitants, the country had been stricken by a series of disas-ters, but in the midst of the political and social misery there was a cultural flowering of which painting was only one aspect. The poet-phil-osopher Søren Kierkegaard, the hymnist N.F.S. Grundtvig, the composer C.E.F. Weyse, the choreographer August Bournonville, were all walking the streets of the little capital city; and a group of scholars at Copenhagen Uni-versity were achieving international repute.

Eckersberg’s Pupils

Not only did Eckersberg contribute to this flowering with his own works. As a teacher at the Academy of Art he also assisted a whole generation of artists to realize themselves. His teaching was an important influence on the following generation’s study of nature, in which landscape painting based on sketches came to represent the inner as well as the outer world. The professor invited his best pupils to go and paint with him. In 1822 Wilhelm Bendz (1804-32) set up his easel in Eckersberg’s private studio, in 1823 Martinus Rørbye (1803-48), in 1826 Wilhelm Mar-strand (1810-73), in 1828 Jørgen Roed (1808-88), Constantin Han-sen (1804-80) and Christen Købke (1810-48). These, with the painters C.A. Jensen (1792-1870), J.Th. Lundbye (1818-48), Danq-vart Dreyer (1816-52) and P.C. Skovgaard (1817-75), who were less closely connected with Eckersberg, form the nucleus of the art of the Danish Golden Age.

Another man who was an inspiration to the younger generation as well as Eckersberg was the art historian N.L. Høyen (1798-1870), who came to teach at the Academy of Art. He was the first art historian to qualify in his subject in Denmark. During his long journeys through Europe he resolved to work for an independent Danish national art form, and he advised young artists against going abroad. In his opinion they would do better to remain in Denmark, undergo training and become inde-pendent before exposing themselves to foreign influences. Høyen encouraged them to paint Danish landscapes and Danish monuments to the illustrious past, and he also urged them to paint people of humble origin. Høyen persevered so persuasively and con-vincingly with his advice that the artists fol-lowed it, as may be seen, for instance in a small picture, “View of the Interior of Aarhus Cathedral”, painted by the greatest colorist of his generation, Christen Købke, at the age of twenty.

Købke

Købke (1810-1848) was the most gifted of Eckersberg ‘s students, and his short career represents one of the high points in Danish art. He had learned his painting with Eckersberg, he used the master’s limpid colors and linear perspective, while taking his subject-matter from Høyen. It was he who had drawn attention to Denmark’s ancient churches, and Købke shows us the interior space where it is highest while at the same time indicating the breadth.

Købke was far from being a Bohemian. He lived in his parents’ home also after he married and his range of subjects was strikingly limited. Most of his paintings are connected with two places and he never saw a point in traveling far away when he could find suitable subjects outside his own door. He began his studies at the Royal Academy in 1882 when he was only twelve years old but it was not until 1828 he came into contact with Eckersberg.
In the first half of the 1830s Købke’s paintings are almost exclusively of his family and friends. In 1834 a change took place in Købke’s art. Whereas he previously had painted little pictures characterized by spontaneity, he now began to paint larger more monumental ones. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich became an important influence on Købke’s painting in the last half of the 1830s. Købke’s art attracted no 
particular attention in his days, and after his father’s death his financial prospects became rather bleak.

Købke preferred to paint the environs of Copenhagen where town and country met. With his pictures of Frederiksborg Castle he created sensitive paintings of one of Denmark’s great historical monuments. Many of his best works exhibit the character of sketches, the colors are applied with spon-taneous directness, a painterly sensitivity and a feeling for light that anticipates the art with which a couple of decades later the im-pressionists would delight the world. The same qualities appear in the work of Con-stantin Hansen (1804-1880), who despite Høyen’s advice accomplished some of his best work in Rome.

Lundbye

Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818-1848) belonged, like Dreyer (1816-1852) and Skovgaard (1817-1875), to the younger generation of the Golden Age artists. They followed a different line of development and their art contained elements more highly charged with romance. Lundbye began his studies at the Royal Academy in 1832 but was not influenced by Eckersberg as he took lessons in drawing from professor J.H. Lund. Lundbye chose animal painting as his specialist field but landscape painting came to occupy a more central role in his work.

His earlier paintings are not far from the art of Eckersberg’s pupils but from 1837 he emerged as a mature artist whose work contributed to mark the breakthrough of national Romantic landscape painting. Lundbye’s declared aim became to praise his country through paintings and over the years he removed himself noticeably from his departure which was Købke’s painting. In the 1840s he was considerably influenced by Dahl (1788-1857), Skovgaard (1817-75) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

In 1848 Lundbye traveled to Italy and on his return he continued painting Danish Landscapes. But his subjects were of more intimate nature than before. His pictures began to take on a frail character, sometimes in lack of harmony. He died in 1848 when he volunteered for service during war. He was killed by an accidental shot but it was later suggested that his death might have been suicide because his diary revealed that he suffered from violent changes of mood.

In Lundbye the artist’s melancholy disposition makes itself felt in the paintings, and this gave his art a specific character that is reflected in the contemporary writings of Søren Kierke-gaard. Lundbye was a man of wide reading, among his peers he was the artist who liked to reflect on the past of Denmark and allow himself to be influenced by what he found there. He would go off on long walking tours with his friends when they would draw what they saw, and Lundbye found a plenitude of artistic material in the antiquities of Den-mark.

The Churches

All Western art can be classified into histori-cal styles and designated Classical, Ro-manesque or Gothic. But these labels are less interesting than the power factors that are thrown into relief by the art of the various periods. In Denmark minute works of art from the Stone Age represent the animals the hunter liked best to catch; by forming an image of them he already, as it were, held them in his hand. To this almost magical ap-plication of art were added the actions that today are interpreted as an artistic manifesta-tion. The Vikings could hit upon the idea of setting a huge stone upright upon a beach from which a boat had once sailed but to which it had never returned. The monolith was not subjected to any artistic process, merely placed upright in a way that conflicts with the nature of the stone and produces artistic tension.

The Vikings learned things on their long voyages, they noticed how in other countries people carved pictures in stone, and when they returned home they began to cut strange ornamental animals to adorn the prows of their ships. They decorated their weapons with figures and designs, and their art in-fluenced the first Christian images in Den-mark.

The church has played an extremely signifi-cant role in Danish art most of whose branches evolved their prototypes from its ex-ample, but the Danish artists did not have such good or valuable materials to work with as the richer countries of the southern Europe. The marble works they had seen had to be repro-duced in granite, and they had to represent huge mosaic ornamentations as best they could in the modest environs of the Danish churches with the aid of some few colours.

A stone-mason in Ribe made a “Descent from the Cross” in granite in 1250. The hard stone resisted him, the artist had to spend in-numerable hours before his chisel uncovered the figures. The resistance of the material can be sensed, the representation exhibits a cer-tain stiffness, there is a particular solemnity and reverence in the style. The central figure of Christ is larger than those around him. His enormous body is lifeless and stiff, yet at the same time the whole composition rests so naturally in place in its semicircular stone. Other sculptors of the period carved lions and made fonts with fantastic decorations with themes from the peripheral areas of Christian-ity.

This and later periods saw the execution of mural paintings of biblical history depicted in simple fashion to edify the people and enjoin them to a life of constant virtue on earth that would gain them admittance to heaven here-after. The wealthier churches were furnished with gilded altars, of which only one or two have been preserved, that show the attempts to imitate the precious materials of other countries by the use of copper-sheeting and glass beads.
Christian art would never have come into being in Denmark without its foreign proto-types, but the Gospel received an independent interpretation here which resulted in a great number of churches being adorned with art that diverged to an astonishing degree from that of other countries. Some of it was created by local artists, some must be assumed to have been carried out by foreign artists familiar with the great building projects and wealthy cities of Europe. Before the Reformation in 1536 the sculptors Claus Berg and Hans Brüg-gemann each produced their great carved al-tarpieces in Odense and Slesvig cathedrals re-spectively. It was they who brought the Re-naissance in its German guise to Denmark, Brüggemann’s carved images are borrowed from Albrecht Dürer’s corresponding compo-sitions in wood.

Skagen and Funen

As in other places under absolutist rule, Dan-ish artists were expected to put themselves at the service of the crown. In order to ensure a regular supply of talent the Academy of Art was instituted in 1754 and foreign artists such as, for instance, the Swedish Carl Gustav Pilo and the French sculptor Jacques Saly were called upon both to compose monumental works of art and to instruct young Danish artists. It was Saly who created the equestrian statue of Frederik V in the palace square at Amalienborg, one of the finest works of its kind in Europe.

The following generation produced artists like Jens Juel (1745-1802) and Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809) and after them Thor-valdsen and Eckersberg. Jens Juel was Denmark’s most prominent painter at the end of the eighteenth century. As a painter he broke away from the rococo and his elegant yet objective representation of reality heralded the Golden Age. Juel was born on the island of Funen and even though he received his early training in Hamburg and later in Rome it was the landscape of his home island, Funen, and portrait paintings that made him famous. Juel was made a member of the Royal Academy in 1782 and taught there as a professor from 1786. Among his pupils were the two German painters Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge.

Danish art had de-veloped an independent form that was built up to an equal extent on native tradition and on influence from abroad. But with Høyen’s repeated warnings against contact with foreign art a crisis gradually arose, instead of Købke’s coloristic grace or J.Th. Lundbye’s seriousness the next generation preferred to paint either more finickingly or with a care-less showiness. Both styles were seized upon when they were exhibited at the World Ex-hibition in Paris in 1878. The critics declared that although Danish artists were represented, Danish art was not.

A group of painters who included P.S. Krøyer (1851-1909) and Michael (1849-1927) and Anna Ancher (1859-1935) distanced themselves from the academic tradition and settled at Skagen on the northern tip of Jutland in order to paint subjects offered by the natural surroundings and people of the region. In 1859 H.C. Andersen visited Skagen and pronounced the area “rich with motifs” and by the 1880s the town became something of an artist’s colony. Both Krøyer and Ancher settled and raised families there. Michael Ancher focused on regional customs by painting local life but his work was inflected by an openness to French naturalism. Krøyer focused on painting himself and his life and gained plenty of success in international exhibitions around the turn of the century.

The Skagen painters achievements during the years centering on 1875, were paral-leled a little later by a number of painters on Funen, among them Johannes Larsen (1867-1961). Both of these groups depicted their own environment through the cycle of the seasons, with light as a dominating factor.

To Each his Own Stamp

The Funen artists were trained at a college run by the painter Kristian Zahrtmann (1843-1917), which like so many other private schools of painting at that time had been founded in protest at the antiquated teaching methods of the Academy. Individuality had become a desirable aim, and in the years preceding 1900 a great many painters emerged, each with his own idiosyn-crasy. There was Theodor Philipsen (1840-1920), who had come to know Paul Gauguin during the latter’s stay in Denmark in 1885 and through him became acquainted with impressionism. There was Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), L. A. Ring (1854-1933) and Niels Larsen Stevns (1864-1941), who were in close touch with the Grundtvigian High School circle, that had such an influence on cultural life at the turn of the century.

Hammershøi takes a special position as he was the only Danish painter who became known throughout Europe while he was still alive. Renoir took note of his Danish colleague and got inspired by the composition of Hammershøi’s “Portrait of a young woman”. However, Hammershøi was not widely accepted in Denmark. The Royal Academy did not find him worthy of one of their travel awards, and only the charity of friends made a travel to Rome possible. Denmark payed less notice of him until he began to receive awards and medals from the rest of Europe. But it was not until his death he gained a proper reputation in his home country. The worship of Hammershøi culminated in a memorial exhibition in 1916 and continued up through the 1920s.

Painters like the Swedish-born Karl Isak-son (1878-1922), Edvard Weie (1879-1943), Sigurd Swane (1879-1973) and Harald Gier-sing (1881-1927), studied French art in the years prior to the First World War and learned to use clear colors in musical con-trast to each other. The sculptor Kai Nielsen (1882-1924) took his inspiration from the works of Auguste Rodin, while his contem-porary Gerhard Henning (1880-1967) was more influenced by Maillol. Danish art owed much to France during this period, the painter J. F. Willumsen (1863-1958) stayed for a time in Brittany with Gauguin, but later turned to a more German-Scandinavian form of ex-pression.

The sculptor Astrid Noack (1888-1954) spent a considerable part of her life in Paris, the painter Vilhelm Lundstrøm (1893-1950) paid more sporadic visits there, although each time he stayed long enough to acquire fresh impressions from Pablo Picasso to take home with him. In 1918 he exhibited a group of non-conceptual collages created under the in-fluence of Picasso’s cubist period and they stand – although they form only a parenthetic part of this artist’s oeuvre – as a kind of dis-ruption in Danish art. They expressed a fare-well to the epoch of the Golden Age, in the same way that the First War was a farewell to a world of yesterday. When ten years or so later the abstract breakthrough had become an established phenomenon, the young paint-ers invited Vilhelm Lundstrøm to exhibit his work with theirs.

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