Martinus Rørbye

“Today I started work on my study of the square, which will be a hard nut to crack, but I am feeling quite calm about it, as I have hired André, the cicerone’s son, and he keeps the boys and other gawping onlookers at bay. It is incredible what one can subject the Neapolitans to. I am almost sitting like a king here.” (Travel journal, 18 August 1835)

Born in Drammen, Norway, Martinus Rørbye is one of the most central painters of the Golden Age. He started at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1820 as a student of C.A. Lorentzen and was later tutored by C.W. Eckersberg. In his young years as an artist, Rørbye was particularly interested in depictions of everyday life on the streets of Copenhagen. His works from that time often have an allegorical and moralising content, based on meticulous studies and first-hand observations of life on the streets. Rørbye was one of the Golden Age painters with the greatest wanderlust and the one that travelled most widely. In 1830, he travelled to Jutland and on to Norway, where he executed several landscape paintings. He then became the first painter in Skagen, where he drew the young fisherman Lars Gaihede on Skagen Strand in 1833. Gaihede became a much-used model for the later Skagen painters. In 1834, Rørbye headed to Paris and from there to Rome, where he continued his work with his depictions of everyday life – now in warmer climes. Here, following in Eckersberg’s footsteps, he painted architectural views in the open air using his distinct sense of light, shadow and perspective. In 1835–36, he travelled on to Greece, Athens and Constantinople, which led to several more landscapes, architectural views and depictions of the exotic, varied and lively everyday life.

Throughout his life, and not least on his lengthy travels, Rørbye showed an unusual interest in people from all walks of life. He depicted them meticulously and with great empathy in his sketchbooks and many small oil sketches, and these studies of people often found their way into his later large and thoroughly prepared compositions of everyday life. Not only did people of all ages interest Rørbye, but so too did plants, animals, costumes, furniture, buildings, kitchen utensils, vegetables, fruit and much more besides. Everything was painstakingly depicted with pencil or brush.

In the same neat and meticulous way, Rørbye also kept a travel journal in which he, among other things, humorously described in great detail the difficulties of sitting under the southern sun and painting directly in front of the motif. The Italians, who eagerly flocked around the painter to weigh in with their opinion, had certainly not made it easier. The journals are some of the very best written sources describing the travel experiences of Danish artists in the first half of the 19th century. Rørbye became a professor in 1844 and died of a sudden illness in 1848, aged just 45.