A decisive innovator of Danish art
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“… those were simply my happiest hours, when I ran out into the open air, a paint box and chair under my arm to paint nature.” (Letter to the painter I.P. Møller, 1815) The fact that Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg has been called the “father of Danish painting” testifies to his enormous importance to Danish art history – and to the Danish Golden Age in particular. He became a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1818, and during the 35 years that he held the position, virtually all Danish artists were influenced by him. His students include some of the most significant Danish Golden Age painters such as Christen Købke, Martinus Rørbye, Constantin Hansen and Wilhelm Marstrand. Eckersberg was born in Blaakrog in Schleswig. He became a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1803, under the painter Nicolai Abildgaard, who, among other things, helped arouse Eckersberg’s great interest in the theory of perspective. At this time, Eckersberg wished to train as a history painter, the most prestigious genre at the European academies. With the help of private benefactors, he travelled to Paris in 1810, where from 1811–1812, he was a student of the leading painter of the time – the French neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David. In 1813, Eckersberg travelled on to Rome, and with his oil studies of the city’s ancient buildings painted directly in front of the motif, under the bright southern sun and blue sky, he introduced plein-air painting into Danish art. These Roman views are today some of his most sought-after works, but in Eckersberg’s days, they were hung in ‘the yellow living room’ of his professor’s residence at Charlottenborg, where his students could study them and copy them. They were not of commercial interest and not, as such, in demand either. The major travels Eckersberg embarked on from 1810–1816 were absolutely pivotal to his artistic development, and his views from Rome were an innovation in Danish art. In 1816, he returned to Denmark, where he was appointed professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1818. He became the go-to portrait painter of the growing bourgeoisie, and he continued with history painting. Over the years, he also executed several altarpieces. In the 1820s, seascapes became Eckersberg’s genre of choice, allowing him to combine his great interest in ships and shipping and fine sense of detail with systematic and precise observations of nature and the changeability of the weather. In the 1830s, Eckersberg helped introduce plein-air painting to the Art Academy in Copenhagen as an integral part of the teaching – one of the first places in Europe to do this – as well as drawing and painting after female nude models. At the same time, he developed his interest in the theory of perspective, and in 1833, he published the book “Forsøg til en Veiledning i Anvendelse af Perspectivlæren for unge Malere”(Guidebook on the Use of the Theory of Perspective for Young Painters), and in 1841 “Linearperspektiven, anvendt på Malerkunsten” (Linear Perspective, Applied to the Art of Painting). It was also in the 1830s that Eckersberg painted several of his small genre paintings – droll, little everyday stories from Copenhagen,including “Langebro i måneskin med løbende figurer” (Langebroin the Moonlight With Running Figures) from 1836. The peculiar thing here is that we’re not fully aware of what exactly is going on in the picture, because the action of the figures is caused by something occurring outside the painting. This is a very unusual painterly narrative technique in a European context, as it wascustomary for the point of the story to be obvious in the work. With his classic schooling and his sober and realistic observations of nature, Eckersberg was a decisive innovator of Danish art, and it’s hard to overestimate his influence, not only on the Golden Age generation of Danish artists, but also on the period that followed, and on modern painting. Eckersberg died of cholera in 1853. |
