The painters of Skagen

Nature is greater and stronger than anything-millennia old yet always new. This is especially emphasized on Skagen. Here the sun has burnt and still burns, the sea has raged and still rages and the sand has whipped in over the land. Grenen (The northernmost spit of sand, where the Kattegat and Skaggerak meet. Both the peninsula from which it protrudes and the town there are called Skagen) once curved more to the south, then it aligned itself again to the east, as the undercurrents of the sea willed it. And out by the North Sea and to the west, the dunes drifted in new formations in over a landscape that is and always has been desolate and graced by an almost blinding light.

It is not clear how long people have lived upon this North Jutland tongue of land but the myths tell of human life on this spot in the 1200s, a life that must have been lonely and primitive. In 1413 the town was granted market town status and the story of Skagen begins there - of people in those formidable natural surroundings. It must not only have been lonely, it must also have been difficult, even very difficult, but it came off. Today the town in summer is clad in green like a garden city, the drift of the sand has long since been halted and the sea has difficulty in wresting land from the coast. If humanity is a tiny dimension in great Nature, here however it has understood how to stem her harsh caprices.

This confrontation between man and nature and its strange consequences is more fascinating than anything else on Skagen. Out of it came a lively, vital town, whose most distinguishing sign of life is the fishing, impressive with its hundreds of cutters in the harbour, the industrial fish processing and the work on the quays.

When the people of Skagen had mastered things and created shelter from the worst storms, then too were the gardens able to bloom around the cosy, little

33 Martinus Rørbye, A commissioner of wrecks on the west coast of Jutland near Skagen. 1847, oil on canvas,31× 43 cm.

houses and summer guests began to come to the town to enjoy the sunshine and the air on the beach. Now Skagen resembles a big city where life flowers on the quaysides, in the hotels, on the main street, in the hostelries, the gardens and the museums. As the sun here is never niggardly in summer, this life is realized in moods of the immediate present upon an ancient place, from the thirteenth century myths to reality today.

The artists on Skagen make up a relatively late chapter of this story, as none were known until the painter Martinus R0rbye first went to the town in 1833.

However, highly talented artists were there earlier and the witness to this is the tower of the silted-up St. Laurentius's church, a showpiece of Late Gothic architecture. The tower should be seen at close quarters. It has breadth and weight, a white cliff with its foot a good way down in the sand. Not just the tower, but the remaining furnishings of the church undoubtedly called in more artists in the course of the fifteenth century and later. To have built this church was in itself a great achievement.

The original houses of the town probably lay immediately around the church buildings, as was then usual in all towns but, long before the drifting sand had closed the church in 1795, it lay deserted in the landscape some distance away from the houses in the West Town.

As already mentioned, it is not known what artistic abilities there were on Skagen before R.Orbye went but the Skagen dwellers of the eighteenth century were not uncultivated people. Several of them had connections with the capital, amongst them the Brondum family. It is most probable; however, that Skagen, like other towns in Jutland, had seen nothing of pictorial art in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Before 1800, it was not usual for artists to go out into provincial Denmark in search of pictorial subjects. But then, however, something new happened. The Danish landscape and provincial Denmark came forward, so to speak, on an equal footing with the capital when it was a question of pictorial subjects.

The Norwegian J.C. Dahl, born in Bergen in 1788 and accepted by the Academy of Arts in Copenhagen in 1811, set the tone in earnest. In his student days, he travelled around Zealand, painting and drawing what he saw with his own eyes - landscapes, buildings and people, in Soro, Praesto, Roskilde and Mon. Two years before Dahl left Copenhagen in 1818, C.W. Eckersberg came home from Rome and continued with the subjects in Copenhagen and North Zealand he had had to give up when he went abroad. In these two artists lies the basis of an important side of the pictorial art of the Danish Golden Age; the depiction of the reality seen in the town and on the land, much as the Dutch had done centuries before in their own country.

On the island of Fyn, Jens Juel had made a tentative effort at something similar when, shortly before 1800, he had painted prospects of landscapes by the Little Belt but there this was more a question of ideal conceptions than the seen reality.

That leaves Jutland and there the first artist was the animal and landscape painter CD. Gebauer, who left Copenhagen in 1828 and settled in Aarhus, where he was visited the following year by his young friend, the painter Christen Kobke. One result of this visit was Kobke's masterpiece, the painting of the interior of Aarhus Cathedral, executed in 1830 when the artist was 20 years old. According to old Philip Weilbach the art historian, Kobke got "the urge to draw and paint from Nature in earnest" during his stay in Jutland in the summer of 1829.

The next famous artist is Martinus Rorbye. He first went to Jutland in May 1830, when he sailed on a ship that also had Hans Christian Andersen on board. Rorbye's journey had to do with a family visit; his aunt was married to the prefect in Thisted and that was his first goal. After landing at Aarhus, he then saw the manor-houses of Rosenholm and Clausholm, stayed several days in Tjele, drew in Viborg and then stayed more than two weeks in Thisted, where he painted Prefect Gerhard Faye's portrait, and then on to Frederikshavn via Aalborg. His brother, the attorney Ferdinand Christian Rorbye, lived there and he stayed with him for ten days. Just as in Viborg and in Thisted, in Frederikshavn he made studies of the town market. His particular interest was figure and costume studies.

He next sailed to Norway, where he had been born in 1803 and where he had kin. He was away four months in all upon this, his first journey, of which two were spent in Jutland. He was industrious the whole time, drawing diligently and, on his return home, transforming several studies to paintings, one of the best known being Market-day morning in Viborg, which he sold to the Copenhagen Art Association. Incidentally, he had no difficulty in selling or in finding pictorial subjects. Even as a twenty-five-year-old, he understood how to depict architecture, landscapes, portraits and narrative genre scenes with a exquisite sense for the subject's particular atmospheric content, character and style.

It was this man who, as a thirty-year-old, was to become the first known pictorial artist on Skagen. His personality as an artist could have been a synonym for the Golden Age painter. Great architecture, the sunlight on a window sill, the wayside flora and man as an individual character, all this was something he could paint before he made his first visit to Skagen. Skagen has not seen such a breadth of artistic talent since.

The one who had depicted the Jutland landscape the earliest and with the greatest human and artistic maturity was, however, Dankvart Dreyer from Fyn. Strongly taken with the poetry of Steen Steensen Blicher, Dreyer travelled to Jutland for the first time in 1838, when he was 22 years old, and painted near Silkeborg - whence he returned several times.

Sometimes he depicted the hills and the heath in such a way that they brought to mind the windswept Scottish Highlands in the poems of Robert Burns so admired by Blicher. He got all the way over to the west coast of Jutland, even up to Bovbjerg. In all, Dreyer executed a score of paintings on the mainland, many of them extremely small but great in content. The Jutland-Scottish tone went so far that some of his landscapes from Fyn were also infected by it.

TASKS