Something Lovely From the State of Denmark
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

We’re all familiar with the clean, spare functionalism of Danish design, but Danish painting and sculpture has had a lesser impact on the public. It is mostly that we don’t get to see much Danish art outside of Denmark – here and there a few doses of Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809), Vilhelm Hammershoi (1862-1916), or Christen Kobke (1810-48).
Thankfully, that is beginning to change. In 1998 the Guggenheim presented a retrospective of Hammershoi, and last year the National Gallery in Washington mounted a splendid retrospective of the painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853). Now, Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is giving us another helping with its gem of a show, “Danish Paintings of the Nineteenth Century From the Collection of Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr.”
Organized by the Bruce Museum of Greenwich, Conn., this is an intimate show of small paintings in three galleries. The 34 canvases were selected from among the roughly 130 pieces in Mr. Loeb’s collection of Danish art, which he began to acquire during his tenure as U.S. ambassador to Denmark (1981-83). The exhibition is not a first-rate show of paintings, per se (ultimately, the works do not compare with those of the Danish artists’ French contemporaries – David, Ingres, Courbet, Corot, Renoir, Monet), but it is a first-rate show of Danish painting, and utterly delightful to view.
Mr. Loeb modeled his acquisition policy on the encyclopedic, and fabulous, collection of 19th-century Danish painting in Copenhagen’s Heinrich Hirschsprung Museum. “[A]ny painter [Hirschsprung] considered outstanding enough to be in his collection,” Mr. Loeb wrote, “was welcome in mine.” This rather impersonal and unimaginative policy is a bit hit and miss – some paintings are fabulous, some are not – but it has resulted in a kind of mini-Hirschsprung (the largest collection of 19th-century Danish paintings outside of Denmark). The collection, and the show, offers a substantial overview of Denmark’s golden age of painting, and beyond, into Danish Impressionism. My only complaint is that we do not get to see the entire Loeb collection; there are major works – by artists such as Eckersberg, Kobke, J.Th. Lundbye, Wilhelm Marstrand, J.P. Moller, and Anton Melbye – from Mr. Loeb’s holdings that are absent from the show. Yet what is here is a choice grouping, beautifully arranged, and well worth a trip to Poughkeepsie.
During the first half of the 19th century, Danish artists were searching for a national identity. Ambitious Danes went to Paris or Rome to absorb French Neoclassicism, plein-air painting, and realism – those who didn’t studied at the Danish Academy with artists who had. Abildgaard, Denmark’s first history painter of note, is one of the strongest painters in the show. He is represented by “Alexander and Diogenes” (late 1780s), a dark, graceful, and grand composition inspired by David and Raphael, in which Alexander – shimmying across the frieze-like space – dances out of the sunlight, which has shrouded the seated Diogenes in shadow.
Eckersberg (a pupil of Abildgaard) studied with David. He is Denmark’s most influential art teacher, introducing plein-air painting and working with live models to Denmark and the curriculum of the Royal Danish Academy. He helped Danish artists to rediscover themselves through the act of painting Denmark’s people, shores, bridges, sea and landscapes. He is not represented in the Vassar show, but his student, Joel Ballin, is. Ballin’s painting “Study of a Model, Young Girl Undressing” (1844) is a solid, clear painting of one of Eckersberg’s favorite models in a violet wallpapered interior. The woman, her cheeks flushed, disrobing and looking down, is the embodiment of Danish neoclassicism and restraint. Austere, plainspoken, almost anti-erotic, the painting is suffused with purity and understatement.
A number of works in the exhibition show the influence of Dutch genre painting. There are tightly woven, competent yet academic paintings of flowers by J.L. Jensen and Sophie Henck; of interiors by Christen Dalsgaard, Carl Holsoe, Carl Bloch, and Carl Thomsen; and of landscapes by Vilhelm Kyhn, and Peder M0nsted. And there are the works that come out of French Impressionism, including Otto Bache’s “Flag Day in Copenhagen on a Summer Day, in Vimmelskaftet” (after 1892), P.S. Kroyer’s “Self-Portrait, Sitting by his Easel at Skagen Beach” (1902), and Bertha Wegmann’s “A Young Woman (Marie Triepcke), Sitting in a Boat” (1884).
Like many cities in the late 19th century, the once-insular Copenhagen grew enormously in size and popularity as exotic goods flowed into its port from India, Africa, and the West Indies. Many feared that outside influences were changing the essentially provincial Danish character, particularly in the arts. The influence of French Impressionism was already understood to have colored Danish painting.
Hammershoi, looking back to Denmark’s connection to 17th-century Dutch genre painting, reclaimed and revitalized the simplicity and inwardness of the Danish spirit. He gave an essentially Modern voice to Danish quietude. The real treat of the show is the small grouping of Hammershis in the last gallery. There we can see a tiny landscape – golden field, distant strip of buildings, sky – worthy of Constable; two spare interiors, bathed in silvery brown and bluish light, each with a ghostly woman arranging objects on a table; a strange, exterior-cum-interior of a woman leaning out a window and looking down into a courtyard; and an iconic, almost spooky view of a church steeple in “The Church of St. Peter, Copenhagen” (1906). Hammershoi’s paintings convey the particularly Danish mix of puritanism and neoclassicism; psychological complexity and guarded modesty. His paintings bring us that much closer to the true nature not only of the Danes but of people everywhere.
From September 30 until December 18 (124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 845-437-5632).