IMPRESSIONIST TREASURES
Prized Danish collection in the spotlight
A little more than a century ago, Danish businessman Wilhelm Hansen made his fortune in insurance and spent it on art.
In 1892, a year after he and his wife Henny were married, they bought their first painting, a small oil study of a cow. By 1918, the couple had collected 140 paintings by 19th century Danish artists and had begun amassing French paintings also from the previous century. Thanks to a burst of buying in Paris between 1916-20, into their hands came works by Manet and Monet, Matisse and Cézanne, Degas, Renoir and Gauguin.
Far from mere hoarders, the Hansens were determined to share with the public their acquisitions, which lined the walls of Ordrupgaard, their country mansion in a suburb of Copenhagen. In 1918, the Hansens began opening Ordrupgaard to the public one day each week.
“I dream almost each night of Ordrupgaard . ... It is probably not out of your thoughts either!” William Hansen wrote to Henny when they were in the thick of collecting in 1916.
A century after the Hansens began exhibiting their collection, art lovers beyond Denmark are beginning to feast their eyes on the couple’s holdings.
After her husband’s death, Henny Hansen bequeathed their home and collection to the Danish state and, in 1953, Ordrupgaard became a museum. Recently works from the collection began touring en masse. As a result, 76 paintings from the collection, including many shown last fall in Paris, will spend the summer at the National Gallery of Canada as its linchpin summer exhibition. The exhibition opened officially Thursday evening.
Sixty of the paintings are French, with landscapes outnumbering still-lifes and portraits. They are arranged chronologically to show the development of Impressionism out of Romanticism, and the later growth of Post-Impressionist art. The exhibition’s been dubbed Impressionist Treasures: The Ordrupgaard Collection.
Concluding the exhibition are 16 Danish paintings, including one from the National Gallery’s collection, Sunshine in the Drawing Room, a typically introspective depiction of an apartment interior by the celebrated artist Vilhelm Hammershøi, which the gallery acquired last year.
With its focus on the 19th century ’s greatest artistic movements, the exhibition “will give you a great overview of an extraordinary mo-
ment in human culture,” Marc Mayer, the National Gallery’s director and CEO, said this week at a media event.
The exhibition’s visit to Ottawa will be its only showing in North America while works from the Ordrupgaard are available for touring. The Danish museum closed last December to allow two years of renovation and construction to take place. Last fall saw more than 40 French paintings from its collection travel to Paris for an exhibi- tion entitled The Hansens’ Secret Garden.
After introducing viewers to the Hansens and Ordrupgaard, the exhibition begins with contrasting works by Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, representatives of the Romanticism and Classicism against which the Impressionists would rebel with their assertions of the primacies of light and colour.
From Delacroix in the exhibition is the artist’s portrait of George Sand, which was originally a double portrait of the female writer listening to her then lover, Frédéric Chopin. After Delacroix died, the painting was cut in two, apparently by an owner who thought two paintings would sell for more than one. The Chopin portrait now hangs in the Louvre.
Also anticipating Impressionism in the collection are several realist works by Gustave Courbet, painted in the 1860s, including a dramatic depiction of leaping deer, ostensibly in a hunter’s gaze.
Camille Corot, whom Claude Monet called “the last of the classi- cists and the first of the moderns,” is well-represented in the exhibition by eight paintings that could be taken as a “mini-retrospective,” says the National Gallery’s associate curator, Erika Dolphin, the exhibition’s organizing curator.
From Édouard Manet, the father of Impressionism, there is an early portrait of his future wife and a charming, more abstracted still life of a basket of pears, painted a year before he died.
From Claude Monet — “the Impressionist par excellence,” Dolphin calls him — there are four landscapes painted between 1865 and 1903. Again, a mini-retrospective, you could say.
At the core of the exhibition are six paintings by Camille Pissarro, who studied the science of colour and created dappled works depicting gardens and Paris street scenes alike. From Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, and from two female Impressionists, Eva Gonzalès and Berthe Morisot, come portraits of women.
Morisot’s 1874 painting Woman with a Fan recalls, almost like a mirror image, the more scandalous Olympia, a reclining nude painted a decade earlier by Manet.
Alfred Sisley, a British national who was born in Paris and spent much of his life there, may be a lesser-known Impressionist. But his paintings, which show preoccupations with sky, light and water, are a discovery within the exhibition.
Eight paintings by Paul Gauguin, dating from the early 1880s to his Tahitian works of the turn of the century, impressively round out the French component of the exhibition, ushering viewers into the realm of Symbolism.
The exhibition’s last room is dedicated to a host of Danish painters, many working on small canvasses. The six sombre paintings by Hammershøi, five from the Hansens’ collection plus the National Gallery’s recent purchase, have the most immediate visual heft.
Dolphin calls the exhibit’s Danish conclusion “a nice revelation for people ... a nice introduction to the Canadian public.”