Danish Art 1780-1930

The first floor of the Dahlerup building features a selection of works from the Glyptotek’s Danish collection. All of the works were created by artists between the late 18th century and the early decades of the 20th century.

The artists include Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann, Jens Juel, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Martinus Rørbye, Peder Severin Krøyer, Astrid Noack, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, Vilhelm Hammershøi and Edvard Weie.

Including a range of major Danish artworks, the exhibition provides insight into key themes and motifs of the period: for example nature studies, landscape painting, model studies, portraits and the fascination of the artists with antiquity.

What binds them together is the story of the extraordinary art collection that Carl Jacobsen started in the late 19th century.

The exhibition also spotlights the artist Kai Nielsen, whose works ranged from monumental sculptures to small statuettes in different materials and made him one of the most prominent Danish sculptors of the early 20th century.

The rooms on the 1st floor provide a view of Kai Nielsen’s marble sculpture, The Water Mother, which he created for the Winter Garden.

Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann

The exhibition also features a new work in the collection: a testamentary gift to the Glyptotek. This portrait by Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann (1819-1881) depicts her daughter, Sophie Dagmar Elisabeth, known as ‘Sofy’ (1859-1944). On 4 November 1878, the 19-year-old Sophie was married to Christian Frederik Emil von Holstein-Rathlou (1849-1919), Master of the King’s Hunt and owner of Rathlousdal Manor near Odder in the region of Jutland. When the portrait was painted in 1879, Sophie had just been awarded the title of Mistress of the King’s Hunt.

The portrait depicts the young, newlywed Sophie sitting on a red-upholstered chair. Her face is in profile, but her body is turned slightly, providing an almost frontal view of her torso. Sophie is wearing a bright red, lace-trimmed dress and a striking necklace. It resembles a type of Bedouin jewellery that Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann featured in several of her orientalist portraits of women, painted after her many travels to Egypt, Greece and present-day Turkey.

Together, Sophie’s slightly blushing face, velvety red dress, buttery golden hair and distinctive gold necklace create an exceptional sensuousness and correspondence of colour – a hallmark of Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann’s paintings.

The von Holstein-Rathlou couple created quite a stir in their time. The story goes that Christian Frederik Emil von Holstein-Rathlou was an eccentric chap. In 1878, in the manor’s woodland, he established a deer park, to which people had free access: features included a spectacular bear cave. Then, in 1899 he purchased the island of Hesselø in the Kattegat.

On the island, he released exotic animals and built a summer residence designed by the architect Martin Nyrop. Here, the couple, together with their seven children, other family members and friends, spent their summers, partying and hunting.

Even in her time, Polish-born Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann was a singular figure: internationally oriented, well-travelled, an advocate of women’s rights, an ambitious artist and a champion of individual freedom. Jerichau Baumann painted a large number of portraits – of artists, royalty and politicians etc.

She was already represented in the museum’s collection of Danish art with a number of other works. They include the major work Mother Denmark and a portrait of her spouse, Sophie’s father, the sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau (1816-1883), a range of whose works is also featured in the exhibition: for example, Sleeping Harvest Girl.

The portrait of Sophie Dagmar Elisabeth von Holstein-Rathlou is a significant addition to the Glyptotek’s collection, adding knowledge both of Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann’s artistic oeuvre and of her biography.

Salomon Ruben Henriques

Recently, the collection has also been enriched with a rare and significant work by the artist Salomon (Sally) Ruben Henriques. His portrait Florentine Standing before a Mirror (1841) can now be experienced alongside the Glyptotek’s other model studies by Eckersberg, Marstrand, and Købke.

The work belongs to a truly fascinating artistic and cultural-historical period – a time of transition in Danish Golden Age art. It is a model study from a time when the female body was, for the very first time, introduced into academic teaching.

Before the 1820s only male models were allowed to pose naked at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. A series of reforms, however, permitted the use of nude female models. As well as being an exercise in the lifelike rendering of the body, early 19th-century works of this kind also demonstrated the increasing inclusion of painterly elements, such as light and cloth, in the model’s surroundings. Another feature of the period’s model studies is the use of poses based on the sculptures of antiquity. Through C.W. Eckersberg’s summer teaching, young artists like Henriques were given the opportunity to engage with such motifs. Florentine – depicted here – was one of the period’s most popular models, portrayed by multiple artists.

It is the first time the museum acquires a work by the painter Salomon Ruben Henriques. He is underrepresented at Danish museums, so the Glyptotek’s acquisition also represents an important enhancement of our knowledge of an artist otherwise overlooked in the Danish museum landscape.

Henriques’ model study is particularly important in light of the museum’s existing collection of model paintings from the same period and the portrayal of the body in the sculpture of antiquity. As such it represents a link between our collections of ancient art and works from the 19th century.