Parti af bugten ved Napoli med Vesuv i baggrunden

The museum keeps only the Danish title — Parti af bugten ved Napoli med Vesuv i baggrunden, “View of the Bay of Naples with Vesuvius in the background” — and dates the small picture 1838–1839. It measures 24.9 × 35 cm and is painted in oil on paper laid down on canvas; the museum holds it in the Royal Collection of Paintings and Sculpture.

Those are the years of Købke’s Italian journey, the great undertaking of his short career: he left Copenhagen in 1838 by way of Dresden, Munich and Rome, and the gallery’s own account of him describes the culmination of the trip as a stay of several months on Capri, the campaign it judges partly underrated and the one that, in its words, gave the painter back his old joy in painting. The Academy reception piece that came out of the same journey, Parti af Marina Piccola på Capri, was not delivered until 1846, and was rejected when it was.

Christen Købke (1810–1848) began to draw as a boy of eleven, and trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under the ageing C.A. Lorentzen before working his way out from under that teacher towards C.W. Eckersberg’s direct observation and lighter colour. The Copenhagen views and portrait groups he made in the 1830s brought him recognition in his own lifetime, but most of his paintings stayed with his family, and his reputation had to be recovered after his death in February 1848 — helped by an exhibition at the Kunstforeningen in 1884 and by Emil Hannover’s biography of 1893. The museum today calls him perhaps the finest painterly talent the country has produced. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).