Mendel Levin Nathansons ældste døtre, Bella og Hanna

In the years around 1820 Eckersberg was occupied with the merchant families of Copenhagen, and it was the commission he took from Mendel Levin Nathanson — two large family portraits — that gave him the means to marry. This is one of the pair: Nathanson’s two eldest daughters, Bella and Hanna, standing either side of a table with a parrot cage in a plainly furnished room, their pale dresses tuned to the colours of the walls and to one another. To be painted by Eckersberg in those years was, as the museum puts it, to be painted by the man a later generation would call the father of Danish painting. He had taught the artists of the Golden Age, and the method he handed on was his own: patient study of the motif in front of him, checked with instruments where they helped — a sextant for his seascapes, a daily record of the weather kept for years. The canvas is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).