Dosseringen seen from the Sea

Dosseringen is a stretch of the shore of Sortedamssøen, the lake on the northern edge of Copenhagen that Købke returned to again and again in the 1830s, and the museum dates this small view of it to about 1837. The museum records the support as oil on paper laid down on canvas; the picture measures 21.5 × 30 cm, and the museum keeps it in a frame of 31 × 39 × 7 cm.

Christen Købke (1810–1848) was born in Copenhagen, entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts as a boy and from 1828 studied under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, whose insistence on working directly from the motif shaped the whole Golden Age generation. Købke made the streets, ramparts and lakeside walks of his native city his principal subject, and travelled to Italy in 1838–1840 by way of Dresden, Munich and Rome. He died of pneumonia in Copenhagen in 1848, aged thirty-seven, and the quiet exactness of his small panels came to stand for Danish painting of the period. The work is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.