Ebba Carstensen is a well-respected artist in her day. She is admitted into the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1909, and is generally a productive artist participating in many exhibitions. During her lifetime, she receives numerous accolades in the form of sizeable grants and study trips; she is the first female member of the artists’ association Decembristerne and part of the Academy Council, and awarded with the Eckersberg Medal in 1930 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1951. After her death in 1967, not much is heard about Carstensen, who is not granted the same publicity as her fellow students Jais Nielsen and Olaf Rude. Ebba Carstensen’s artistic work is two-pronged; in the winter she paints motifs from her studio in Copenhagen, while in the summer, she stays at her summer house in Horneby near Hornbæk – not far from her good friend and colleague Astrid Holm, with whom she also collaborates. In North Zealand, like the Impressionists, Carstensen paints under the open sky. Cows, farm labourers, forest landscapes and harvest motifs recur in many of her works. This work is one of her more naturalistic harvest landscapes, with a more muted palette. She works with distinct brush strokes, which in several of her works appear broad and somewhat angular. From early on, Carstensen is enchanted by Expressionism and Cubism, which she sees in Paris. She experiments with colour and form, moving her landscapes towards a more expressive style with abstract elements.

There is no doubt that Carstensen fights for any recognition she receives throughout her lifetime. She is known to have a lively, strong personality, and speaks out about being a woman in a male-dominated industry. That she later slips into oblivion is not only a shame, but quite astonishing. However, one can only rejoice at the fact that the focus there has been on female artists over the past decade helps rewrite her into art history and give her works fresh relevance.