Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in 19th-Century Danish Art

Johan Thomas Lundbye, Refsnæs, Coastscape (detail), 1844, . Pen and brown and gray ink, brush and watercolor. SMK-The National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen. Image: SMK Photo/Jakob Skou-Hansen

During an era marked by military defeat, financial collapse and national disintegration, 19th-century Danish artists examined themselves, their country, and their culture with heightened scrutiny. The seemingly peaceful and intimate subjects they portrayed convey notions of belonging and displacement as Denmark was transforming into a smaller, somewhat marginalized country at the edge of Europe. Beyond the Light explores the evolution of Danish art from approximately 1809 to 1912. Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK) in Copenhagen,features over 80 drawings, sketchbooks, oil sketches, and paintings.

Most artists of the period trained at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, forging a tight-knit community that led to Denmark’s first national artistic style. Artist Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg became professor of the Academy in 1818 and was instrumental in creating a curriculum that encouraged students to cultivate a devotion to mathematical perspective and to drawing from nature. With styles fluctuating between realism and idealism, the first section of the exhibition presents portraits of individuals and groups of artists, such as Constantin Hansen’s painting A Group of Danish Artists in Rome, which features the comrades collaborating abroad.

The second section explores how art expressed a sense of national identity emerging in Denmark in the years following economic disaster, and political defeat. Artists focused on subjects they regarded as distinctly Danish, from buildings and interiors to the topography of Copenhagen—all to elevate Danish history, customs, culture, and language. Examples include Christen Købke’s One of the Small Towers on Frederiksborg Castle and Martinus Rørbye’s Viborg, Seen from Asmild Klosterhave near Søndersø. This section includes Getty’s recently acquired painting Interior with an Easel by Vilhelm Hammershøi.

Denmark is nearly surrounded by water, with seascapes among the most popular subjects in Danish art. The third section embraces the country’s strong relationship to the sea, including the exhibition’s largest work, Copenhagen Harbor by Moonlight by Johan Christian Dahl. Also on view are landscapes that evoke the past, such as Johan Thomas Lundbye’s Refsnæs, Coastscape, which depicts one of Denmark’s Stone Age dolmens surrounded by rolling hills, steep cliffs, and a lengthy coastline.

The fourth and final section takes visitors outside Denmark as artists from The Royal Danish Academy traveled to foreign lands such as France, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Turkey. They studied and depicted the picturesque sites, the local inhabitants, and the patterns of weather and of light so different from those of their native land. One of the more popular subjects was the architectural ruins of ancient Rome, evident in Købke’s The Forum, Pompeii, with Vesuvius in the Distance.