The Hartmann art collection

The Hartmanns were a highly cultured family for whom music, art, literature and travel played a crucial role. The family members included the two composers, the father Emil Hartmann (1836–98) and the grandfather J.I.P. Hartmann (1805–1900), as well as the two children, the artist Oluf Hartmann (1879–1910) and the later estate owner and social philanthropist, Bodil de Neergaard (1867–1959) from Fuglsang Manor on the island of Lolland.

An art collection is born

Most of the works up for auction come from Fuglsang. The manor house served as a cultural centre, where Bodil de Neergaard was the natural hostess. The composers Carl Nielsen, Edvard Grieg, Franz Neruda and other Danish and international musical celebrities met and played music here.

Aged 18, Bodil de Neergaard married the owner of Fuglsang, Rolf de Neergaard, who was 30 years her senior. She was in charge of the décor, and over the years, she acquired antiques and especially paintings, including portraits of the Hartmanns and the Puggaards (her mother’s family), painted by Wilhelm Marstrand and Kristian Zahrtmann, but the collection also came to include works by Jørgen Sonne and, of course, her brother, Oluf Hartmann.

A brilliant artistic talent

It is a number of these works that we now have the pleasure of selling at auction, the majority of them painted by Oluf Hartmann. He revealed his artistic talent as a child, and as a young man, he became a pupil of Sophus and Gustav Vermehren. In the years from 1896–1902 he perfected his skills at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen and completed his training at Kristian Zahrtmann’s painting school in 1904. Oluf Hartmann worked primarily with biblical motifs, but motifs inspired by the landscape around his sister’s manor house at Skejten also found their way into his works – the same surroundings that Olaf Rude later captured in his well-known landscape paintings, which today hang in the Chamber of the Danish Parliament at Christiansborg. 

Oluf Hartmann is praised in particular for his superior sense of composition and the serious content of his works, which strangely also betray a lively imagination and a baroque whim. In his day, he was considered one of the great hopes of the Danish art scene, but he died young following a failed appendectomy.

Preview and auction

Some 40 paintings and drawings are set to go under the hammer at online auction 1405 at 8 pm on Monday 27 January and the next international auction at the end of February. A preview of the works featured at the online auction will be held at Sundkrogsgade 30 in Copenhagen's Nordhavn until the day of the auction. See opening times here

View and bid at the online auction of the Hartmann collection

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