Great Danish artists of the 19th century: from Hammershøi and the Copenhagen Interior School to the Skagen painters

During the 19th century, Denmark experienced more ups and downs than the plot of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, its most famous writer. Siding with France in the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the bombardment and destruction of huge swathes of its capital city, Copenhagen. The country was declared bankrupt in 1813 and forced to cede its control of Norway a year later.

Further humiliation — and defeat — came in 1864, when war against Prussia and Austria saw Denmark lose the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein and Lauenburg (a third of its territory). Against such a tricky geopolitical backdrop, however, the Danes produced myriad interesting artists across the century.

The best-known of them, Vilhelm Hammershøi, was, chronologically, one of the last. He’s renowned, above all, for his atmospheric paintings of the inside of the Copenhagen apartment he shared with his wife, Ida. She appears in many of them: alone and, more often than not, with her back to us, as in works such as Stue (Interior with an Oval Mirror), which sold at Christie’s in 2022 for $6.3 million.

There’s a hushed quality to these scenes, and a muted sense of colour, as well as an emptiness which prefigures the minimalism of 20th-century Scandinavian design.

Interest is growing, however, in the other genres that Hammershøi worked in, such as landscape and portraiture. A number of upcoming exhibitions are duly devoted to his oeuvre in the round (rather than concentrating on his interiors, as previous shows have tended to) — Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Eye that Listens, for example, which is being held in 2026 at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid and then the Kunsthaus Zürich.

He produced a compelling self-portrait, for example, not long after turning 30. Dressed in a jacket and tie, Hammershøi casts his gaze away from us, towards his right. He’s captured in grey and brown tones so subtle that he seems almost to be being pulled into the canvas.

If Hammershøi lacks the confident look here that he shows in an etching of him from 1900, by Peter Ilsted, perhaps that’s because the self-portrait was produced five years earlier, at a time in his career when he was still on the cusp of making it big. (The year of 1895 would also see the artist undertake one of his largest and most important commissions, Tre Unge Kvinder, a scene of three young women sitting silently together in a parlour, painted for the violin-maker Emil Hjorth.)

As for his interiors, it’s worth pointing out that Hammershøi wasn’t alone in producing this type of painting. He was part of a group of artists sometimes called the Copenhagen Interior School. They included Carl Vilhelm Holsøe and the aforementioned Peter Ilsted (Hammershøi’s brother-in-law).

Hammershøi appears to have spoken for them all when he said, ‘I’ve always thought that there was… beauty about a room [when] there weren’t any people in it.’

In Sunlit Breakfast, Holsøe depicts a lone female — probably his wife — with her back to us. She stares out of an open window, the work’s title alluding to a meal that either has just been eaten or shortly will be (hence the two empty plates on a table between us and the woman). Where Hammershøi’s domestic scenes can seem almost ethereal, Holsøe’s tend to be more down-to-earth and intimate. They communicate beauty through the harmonious play of shadow and light.

Neither artist was around for the period widely referred to as the Danish Golden Age. This ran from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the middle of the 19th century, and encompassed all manner of cultural achievement. Among the Danes of note were the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard; the ballet master August Bournonville; the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted; and, of course, the writer Hans Christian Andersen.

In the visual arts, a crucial Golden Age figure was Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, who served as a professor, and later the director, of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. This institution had been established in the mid-18th century, but under the influence of Eckersberg — who instructed students to ‘paint whatever you wish’ — teaching was revolutionised. Out went a narrowly traditional, academic approach and a preference for history painting.

Broadly speaking, this popularising trend mirrored a democratisation in Denmark’s society at large, with the emergence of a bourgeois class, and the rule of absolute monarchy giving way in the 1840s to parliamentary democracy.

Eckersberg counted Christen Købke, Martinus Rørbye and Wilhelm Bendz among his students. Rørbye was fond of nocturnal scenes, such as Artillerymen on guard at the Citadel of Copenhagen (1828). In this work, three uniformed guards can be seen lighting torches to mark the occasion of the marriage of the Crown Prince Frederik (later King Frederik VII) and Princess Vilhelmine.

Rørbye was influenced not just by Eckersberg, but by a second seminal figure in Golden Age painting: the art historian Niels Laurits Høyen. ‘A country’s art must necessarily be national,’ Høyen said, urging artists to engage with people and landscapes across Denmark.

Another keen follower of his was Julius Exner, who made a name for himself with portrayals of country life. In The letter, Exner depicts a woman in her humble rural home, sitting down to write beside a window that looks out onto the coast. She is dressed in traditional folk costume and seems to have recently set down work on her spinning wheel. Exner’s attention to detail extends to the patches of rough, uneven plastering on the walls.

Other noteworthy figures of Danish 19th-century art include the portraitist and still-life artist Bertha Wegmann. Likewise the Skagen painters. These artists were so attracted by the fishing village of Skagen on the northernmost tip of Denmark that they established a colony there, from the 1870s till the turn of the century. Peder Severin Krøyer, Michael Ancher, and his wife Anna Ancher, are perhaps the best known of them today. In many cases, the Skagen painters worked en plein air in a manner and technique indebted to the French Impressionists, with local fishermen as frequent subjects.

Despite being produced at roughly the same time, their pictures were a far cry from the interiors of Hammershøi and Holsøe, of course. It’s sometimes said that those two painters focused artistically on their own homes because, after a century of national upheaval, they felt that these were among the few safe spaces left to paint. (According to the historian Tom Buk-Swienty, writing in his book 1864: The Forgotten War that Shaped Modern Europe, Denmark ‘teetered on the edge of extinction’ with its defeat to Prussia and Austria in 1864, and briefly faced the prospect of becoming part of the German Confederation.)

The truth is that Danish art in the period under consideration showed great variety and originality — something corroborated by international exhibitions such as The Golden Age of Danish Painting (1801-1864), held at the Petit Palais in Paris in 2020-21, and Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art, held in 2023 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and then the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

These shows shone a light on artists who, in the period since their own lifetimes, have largely been overshadowed by their famous European peers. Maybe they would have appreciated Kierkegaard’s aphorism that ‘patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown’.