Constantin Hansen's complexity

 

With three vastly different paintings in terms of motif, we traverse the entirety of Constantin Hansen’s (1804-1880) artistic oeuvre – from the near to the distant, from the large to the small. Each painting is of very high quality, richly evocative, and rendered with great empathy and technical ability.

Master of topography

Located near Ringsted, Kværkeby Church was one of Constantin Hansen’s favoured motifs. Here we encounter the artist as an important painter of topography – one with a deep understanding of how to capture the atmosphere surrounding a Danish village church on a spring evening in 1834, where the trees have just begun to green, and where a pair of storks has built their nest on the church roof.  

Constantin Hansen was a renowned visitor to the area in and around Ringsted, where his close friend and colleague Jørgen Roed made his home. In a letter to his sister Alvilde dated 1 June 1832, Constantin Hansen mentions that ”tomorrow I will paint a little view from Quærkebye". And he was as good as his word!

The painting would later be included in art historian Emil Hannover’s catalogue of Hansen’s works, where it is described in glowing terms:

”The most beautiful of the landscapes is the laboriously rendered and nicely cropped image of Kværkeby Church, painted on a bright spring evening in May 1832 (...) With its verdant sense of burgeoning spring it is one of the first and most fresh sprouts of the love of nature that Eckersberg instilled in the hearts of his students and by which he nurtured the art of landscape painting in Denmark.”

Italian skies

We then travel from Ringsted to Rome. The auction also presents one of Constantin Hansen’s magnificent motifs of the Forum Romanum, which he painted in 1846 – strongly inspired by similar motifs by his icon and teacher, C.W. Eckersberg. The painting depicts the impressive ruins of the Concordia temple (known today as the Temple of Saturn) and the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, but it also portrays the lives of the Italians themselves in an idyllic way – the square between the picturesque ruins is populated by Romans in relaxed poses standing under the baking hot sun.       

Constantin Hansen felt a true affinity with Rome, where he was born during his parents’ stay in the city that was then the centre of the artistic universe. He would return for a time later in his life, when he travelled around Italy for a number of years – rather as was the custom for the painters of the Golden Age, most of whom were fond of such painterly journeys to southern climes. Rome’s significance to Danish art in the nineteenth century can thus hardly be overestimated – it was here that creative souls came together in defiance of national borders to thrive in an environment suffused with inspiration, where the Italian people and ruins of antiquity could be interpreted in grand style. And it is this style we see in the works of Constantin Hansen.  

The art of the portrait

One of the auction’s distinctive portraits reveals a third side of Constantin Hansen’s artistry – this time as a highly insightful painter of character portraits. This was in fact the genre in which he made the greater part of his living. This portrait was painted in 1835, and the model is the young, gifted and brilliant Martin Hammerich (1811-1881), who studied theology, mythology and philology. He was one of the founders of the Liberal Student Society, and during his 42 years of service as dean of the Civic Virtues School in Christianshavn, he was also one of the leading figures in the contemporary Danish educational reforms. And in 1852, he added another string to his bow in the form of the title of professor.

This portrait tempts the observer to believe that Constantin Hansen sensed the great future before the attractive 24-year-old Martin Hammerich, and therefore chose to depict him with crossed arms, plenty of attitude and an air of remote self-assurance.    

Welcome to the many-sided world of Constantin Hansen!

 

Preview: 4-8 March

Auction: 8-12 March

View the Constantin Hansen paintings here

View all the items of the auction here

Read more about the auction here