Maleren Constantin Hansen

A painter stands at his easel in a red cap and grey working coat, palette loaded, brush lifted, looking straight out of the picture as if caught between strokes. Wilhelm Marstrand (1810–1873) painted Constantin Hansen (1804–1880) in 1862, near the end of both their careers, and the portrait is a double document: of Hansen, the most scholarly of the Eckersberg circle, the painter of The Assembly of Danish Artists in Rome and of Greece-tinted history scenes, still at work in his seventies; and of Marstrand, Eckersberg’s favourite pupil, the unmatched painter of Danish social life, whose own course ran from Italy through Holberg’s comedies to the professorship and directorship of the Academy. The two had known each other for thirty-five years — fellow students, fellow travellers in Rome in the late 1830s, fathers-in-law to each other’s families — and the ease of the likeness is the ease of that history: no ceremony, the sitter simply seen at his profession. The picture entered the royal collections, and hangs in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).