Constantin Hansen

“Can you tell me what comes after the Copper Age? The Golden Age has never been in my pocket. The Silver Age has ended, and I have kept just 3 bajocs in order to hold on to the Copper Age for as long as possible. When the Iron Age comes, there will be nothing in my pocket other than my gate key.” (Letter to the architect Thorvald Bindesbøll, 1839)

Constantin Hansen began his education with his father, the portrait painter Hans Hansen. Under his influence, he took an early interest in portrait painting in the tradition of Jens Juel, who was his father’s great role model. In 1816, Constantin Hansen started at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, switching to the Academy’s Schools of Visual Arts in 1825. In 1829, he became a student of C.W. Eckersberg. Under Eckersberg’s influence, Constantin Hansen developed a keen interest in architectural painting, and when he received a travel grant in 1835, he headed to Italy and Rome to study the ancient buildings in particular.

Inspired by Eckersberg’s Roman views, he painted several oil sketches under the open skies. In these sketches, his great understanding of the forms of architecture, the perspective, the colours and light and shadow are fully expressed, very much in the style of the later plein-air painting of Impressionism. It was in Rome in 1837 that Constantin Hansen painted his main work “Et selskab af danske kunstnere i Rom” (A Group of Danish Artists in Rome). During the almost 10 years that he remained in Italy, Constantin Hansen travelled to Naples and Pæstum, among other places, accompanied by his fellow artist Jørgen Roed, and to Capri with Christen Købke. Together with the decorative artist Georg Hilker (1807–1875), he studied the ancient frescoes in Naples and Pompeii. Together with Hilker in Rome, Hansen began the first drafts for the decoration of Copenhagen University’s lobby, returning to Denmark in 1844 to execute this large commission featuring motifs from ancient mythology in Pompeian style. It was a lengthy commission and not completed until 1853. Unfortunately, in the meantime, under the influence of national currents, interest in ancient mythology had waned in favour of Nordic mythology, therange of motifs of which Constantin Hansen subsequently took up. In his later years, he took up portrait painting again.