Portraits, Mythology and Urban Life

The Painter of Portraits

This summer's international auction kicks off with 135 older paintings and drawings, including Danish art of an extraordinary quality. The artist Jens Juel was a master of virtually all the genres of painting, but in the second half of the 1700s his primary focus became painting representatives of the society's elite. Included at the auction are two portraits of the Supreme Court Justice Iver Rosenkrantz-Levetzau and his wife Juliane, both wearing the fashion of the time. He appears with a grey-purple jacket, white cravat and ribbon, white wig with two-parted rolls of hair and a black neck bow, while she is dressed in a silk dress, with roses on her chest and in her powdered hairdo.

Eckersberg’s Classical Motifs from Paris

C. W. Eckersberg became the next century's most prominent artist in Denmark, and as many of the Danish Golden Age painters, he journeyed south to find inspiration. Included in the auction are two paintings from his stay in Paris during the years 1810-13. One is based on Greek mythology and the story of King Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. The shame of finding out the truth drove Oedipus to blind himself, and in the painting he is led across a bridge in a rocky landscape by his beautiful daughter Antigone. In Eckersberg’s other work a young couple dressed in traditional clothes are in mid-seduction, but are disturbed by the symbolic snake in the foreground.

The Cigar Merchant in the Doorway

No one has depicted the streets, buildings and street life of Copenhagen in the years around 1900 as eminently as Paul Fischer. His evocative paintings bear witness to a time when the city had been freed from its surrounding ramparts and evolved into a modern metropolitan city with new means of transportation, large masses of people and a constant atmosphere of activity and construction. In one of the auction's paintings the image depicts Amager Torv during winter, where workingmen are in the process of shovelling snow and the postman and delivery boy are on their way with the day's deliveries. Meanwhile a policeman keeps the peace, and the bourgeoisie stroll along the fashionable stores of the shopping street Strøget. In the doorway to one of the shops stands cigar merchant W.Ø. Larsen and looks out over the bustling scene of activity, and according to the current owner of the painting, the painting was originally commissioned by the merchant directly from the artist.

Auction: Tuesday 31 May in Bredgade 33, Copenhagen

Preview: 26-30 May at the same address

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