Thursday, September 13, 2007

Autumn Morning on Lake Sortedam

I have been in Copenhagen where I took a look at the Danish Golden Age landscapes in the Carlsberg Glyptotek. The galleries start with Eckersberg ("the father of Danish painting") and then move onto the oil sketches and paintings by his pupils and successors, where one can't help gloomily noticing how young many of the artists were when they died (Eckersberg outlived most of them). Christen Købke for example (who died in 1848 age 37) painted some really striking landscapes in a palette of pale peach and plum (I'm afraid these adjectives don't do justice to the paintings' melancholy moods). Two are on show at the Glyptotek: Autumn Morning on Lake Sortedam and Autumn Landscape. Frederiksborg Castle in the Middle Distance. I see from this blog that the former has been assigned to the Danish canon of 'monuments of national importance and priceless value for Danish culture'... Another of Købke 's autumn paintings is reproduced below.



Christen Købke, Frederiksborg Palace in the light of evening, 1835
Source: Wikimedia Commons

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