Studie fra Limfjorden

The museum keeps the Danish title Studie fra Limfjorden — a study from the Limfjord, the water that cuts across northern Jutland — and the canvas is signed in the painter’s hand C.D. Septbr 1851. It entered the collection in 1919 and hangs in the gallery today; the museum has shown it in Limfjorden at Sophienholm in 2011, in Guldalderkunst at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in 2013, and in the 2001 retrospective Christen Dalsgaard 1824–1907 at Sorø Kunstmuseum, Skive Kunstmuseum and Den Hirschsprungske Samling. Christen Dalsgaard was trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and the museum describes him as the painter who perhaps most consistently took up N.L. Høyen’s call, made in a celebrated lecture to the Scandinavian Society in 1844, to seek out the life of ordinary people as it was lived in the most remote parts of the country. Jørgen Sonne was the first to answer it, and Dalsgaard followed very soon after, together with F. Vermehren and Julius Exner. His earliest paintings, exhibited at Charlottenborg from 1847, were landscapes from Jutland; he then began the cycle of peasant interiors that made his name, setting down the country people of Salling and other Jutland districts as a painterly parallel to Steen Steensen Blicher’s Jutland stories, and in a series of masterpieces he depicted the hard hours of that life — work the museum reads as pointing forward to the social realism of L.A. Ring. The painting is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).