Christen Dalsgaard
(Skive 1824 - 1907 Sorø)
Hellested Præstegaard
1850
Oil on canvas
24.5 x 30.8 cm
Signed and dated lower right C.D. 1850
Bearing a hand-written label on the verso of the canvas
Dalsgaard / Hellested Præstegaard [Prastegaard?] / 1850
Provenance:
Auction Sale, ABR, 212, 1967, no. 53, illus. p. 7
Frands Hougaard Collection
The Danish artist Christen Dalsgaard was one of the leading genre painters in the transition from the Golden Age of Danish painting to the birth of naturalism. His austere realism and intense attention to detail owe much to the legacy of C.W. Eckersberg and his school. Eckersberg was the most important figure in early nineteenth-century Danish painting.
Dalsgaard[1] studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen between 1841 and 1848. He was privately tutored by Martinus Rørbye (1803-48) - later a close friend. It was under Rørbye's guidance that he honed his skill in the precise observation of nature and detailed study of his subjects. He learnt to develop his interest in the organization of pictorial space and deepen his understanding of spatial relationships in the Eckersberg tradition. He studied the effects of light to sharpen his radical way of seeing and used a reduced palette to 'capture reality', producing highly distinctive harmonies of tone and colour. He painted many of his landscape subjects at different seasons and in different lights. An earlier version of the present painting, titled Hellested Præstegaard and executed in 1847, shows the præstegaard in autumn. Dalsgaard uses the same viewpoint in the present painting but the handling of the subject and the lighting clearly emphasize the characteristics of the season.[2]
His central theme was the accurate portrayal of life in the country. The leading Danish nineteenth-century art historian Niels Lauritz Høyens gave a legendary lecture at the Scandinavian Society in 1844 in which he challenged the emerging generation of artists to go out and record in their paintings their observations of rural life in remote areas. Daalsgaard energetically went about pursuing this aim. To this end he visited the Danish island of Seeland - where Hellested lies - a number of times. His highly distinctive and precise depictions of rural interiors and local costumes brought him recognition and he came to be seen as the Danish national painter of his era.[3]
[1] For further reading and a biography, see Saur. Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich 1991, III, p. 555. The first exhibition of Dalsgaard's work was held at Charlottenburg Palace in Copenhagen in 1848. He was awarded the Neuhausen Prize in 1861. He was a professor at the Sorø Academy between 1862 and 1892.
[2] Oil on canvas, 29 x 40 cm, Hirschsprungske Collection, Copenhagen; see Knud Voss, Dansk Kunst Historie, Friluftsstudie og virkelighedsskildring 1850-1900, Copenhagen 1974, p. 35, fig. 19.
[3] Johannes V. Jensen, Jydske Folkelivsmalere. Dalsgaard. Michael Ancher. Hans Smidth, Copenhagen 1937. Dalsgaard began to paint Danish historical subjects in the 1860s. His paintings are often compared with the work of the Norwegian painter Adolph Tidemann (1814-76) who studied in Copenhagen and went on to found a group of Scandinavian artists in Düsseldorf.