Familien Nathanson

Eckersberg’s most figure-rich and complicated portrait was commissioned in 1818 by the Copenhagen merchant Mendel Levin Nathanson, the painter’s most important patron of the 1810s and one of the leading advocates of the integration of Danish Jews into the country’s public life. Nathanson wanted the canvas to do social work as well as record his household: it set a Jewish family at the centre of the bourgeois culture that was becoming the dominant one in Denmark. Eckersberg’s diaries place the commission in 1818 and point to a finished picture that December, and infrared examination has since shown how extensively he reworked faces, arms, hands and clothing as he went. The canvas stayed in the family until Nathanson’s son left it to the museum by bequest in October 1887. It belongs to the opening years of the Danish Golden Age, and to the decade in which Eckersberg, newly returned from Rome, was teaching a generation of Danish painters to work from direct observation of the world in front of them. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).