The father of Danish painting

The king’s art anno 1800

C.W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) grew up at a time when there was not much of an art scene in Denmark. Although the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1754, its students were trained to serve the system. The few Danish artists that there were in those days all worked for the despotic monarch, and the art therefore reflected the king’s preferences and functioned primarily as propaganda – although it was executed according to the changing styles of the period, i.e. Rococo and Neoclassicism.

The accurate observation of reality

C.W. Eckersberg challenged the art scene of the day. He came to stand as the exponent of a new artistic vision which took inspiration from a positivist mindset that developed in the early 1800s. With the new scientific ideals in mind, Eckersberg worked on the accurate observation of nature, the human body, culture and everyday life, capturing these experiences in his works.

He based his works on the realistic depiction, but that’s not to say that his works lacked composition – far from it, even down to the minutest detail! He chose the angles that were to the best advantage of the motif – even if it meant taking a tree or a building out of the composition.

As a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Eckersberg created the first real Danish art school, where a lively art scene unfolded around him. He was a highly influential mentor to many of the Golden Age’s biggest names, including Christen Købke and Constantin Hansen.

Life-changing study trip

With the selection of C.W. Eckersberg up for auction, we are turning back the clock to his study trip years from 1810-1812, when the young painter was taking advantage of the travel grants he had been awarded. First, he went to Paris, where he received tuition from one of the leading artists of the day, Jacques-Louis David. Not only did he work on figure study, but he also moved outside into the street, depicting the everyday phenomena he observed. This resulted, among other things, in the work up for auction depicting a mother and daughter whom he has captured at a moment when the mother is deeply engrossed in her needlework and the girl in her doll.

Nature’s perfect picture

“One day, I was to bring something, among other things, a black bottle to a man in the town (…). By chance, I observed that the area around me was mirrored in the bottle, but reduced, and I saw here a painting of the surroundings, so lovely, so complete, so true (..).”

This childhood memory was seminal to C.W. Eckersberg’s work. To him, it was an expression of the fact that nature had an inherent perfect picture – the divine.  He subscribed to the romantic view that the purpose of art was to reproduce the ideal or divine nature.

Over the years, he often framed a visually significant segment of the world in order to capture this perfect picture – in his depictions of everyday life, too. This was a technique he already mastered on his study trip, which also took him to Rome. This is evident, for example, in the work up for auction, where the colonnades frame the motif and give us a little snippet of life in an Italian monastery.

C.W. Eckersberg’s training in perspective

As part of C.W. Eckersberg’s efforts to produce a precise reproduction of nature, he was, from a very young age, preoccupied with the impact of perspective on the composition. This is very clear in the auction’s perspective drawing from Rome which depicts three people at a well, with the perspective lines still visible. 

Much of his later training at the Academy involved perspective. In 1833, his interest led him to the publication of the text book “En Veiledning i Anvendelsen af Perspectivlæren for unge Malere” (A guide to the use of perspective for young painters), and later to the book “Linearperspectiven, anvendt paa Malerkunsten” (Linear perspective used in painting), which he illustrated with his own etchings.

Auction: Tuesday 18 September
Preview: from 13-17 September

View the works up for auction by C.W. Eckersberg

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