Niels Ryberg med sin søn Johan Christian og svigerdatter Engelke, f. Falbe

The museum catalogued the picture for most of its life under the older, traditional title Det Rybergske familiebillede — the Ryberg family picture — and the title it carries now names all three sitters: the Copenhagen merchant and shipowner Niels Ryberg (1725–1804) with his son Johan Christian and his daughter-in-law Engelke Falbe. The canvas was acquired in 1960 and hangs today in the museum’s 18th-century rooms; it has been shown there in Nature Strikes Back (2009–10) and Ufortalte historier (2017). It is reproduced in the gallery’s 50 værker du skal se på SMK / 50 Favourites in the SMK Collection (2024) and catalogued as no. 682 in Ellen Poulsen’s Jens Juel (1991); it is also discussed in Karl Madsen’s Kunstens Historie i Danmark (1901–07), Kasper Monrad’s Hverdagsbilleder (1989) and Dansk Guldalder (2013), and Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen’s Dansk kunst (2003).

Jens Juel (1745–1802) was born on Funen, trained in Hamburg and then at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, won that Academy’s gold medal in 1771 and spent 1772–74 travelling in Germany, Italy, France and Switzerland on a stipend raised by a circle of private patrons, after which he left history painting behind and became the leading portraitist of his generation in Denmark. The museum’s account of his career singles out his large compositions of two or more figures — among them the Reventlow double portrait of 1772 and the Raben and Ryberg family groups of 1796 and 1797 — as the high points of his work. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).