Et selskab af danske kunstnere i Rom

Constantin Hansen had gone to Italy in 1835 to study the painting of architecture, and in 1838 he sent this canvas home to Copenhagen. What he sent was a room full of his own colleagues — a company of Danish artists who have come together, the museum’s own account says, not to make merry but to talk about art, the architect Gottlieb Bindesbøll stretched out on the floor in the middle of them describing his journey to Greece. The picture belongs to the years that would afterwards be called the Danish Golden Age, and it holds two kinds of painting at once: the group and friendship portrait, and the figure composition in which the sitters are arranged as a design. The museum reads the deliberate gravity of the scene as an answer to the carefree Italian pictures Danish buyers preferred, and as an assertion that the making of art was serious intellectual work. Hansen was born in Rome in 1804 and named for his godmother, Mozart’s widow; he trained at the Copenhagen Academy and only turned from architecture to painting in his twenties. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).