Collection: Art prints by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg was a Danish painter and is considered the founder of the so-called Danish Golden Age, a golden age of painting that enabled the country to make a surprisingly independent contribution to European art history in the early 19th century. He was born in southern Jutland in 1783 and trained at the Copenhagen Academy of Art, where he would later become a teacher and director himself. One of his formative teachers was Nicolai Abildgaard, whose intellectual approach to painting had a lasting influence on the young Eckersberg.

Eckersberg received the decisive impetus for his artistic development during his stay of several years in Paris and Rome, where he lived and worked from 1810 to 1816. In Paris, he studied under Jacques-Louis David, the master of French classicism, and internalized his sense of clarity, composition and graphic precision. In Rome, he turned to direct observation of nature and began to paint the city and its surroundings with a sober attention that was unusual for his time. Eckersberg did not want to idealize, but to see - precisely, calmly and without exaggeration.

After his return to Copenhagen, he became the focus of a lively circle of young artists, whom he trained as a professor at the academy. His teaching emphasized the precise observation of nature, the study of light and the discipline of the craft. His students included Christen Købke and Wilhelm Bendz, who transformed their teacher's legacy into independent and significant works. Eckersberg's own oeuvre includes portraits, architectural views, landscapes and marine paintings, in which he achieved a combination of classical rigor and fresh immediacy that still lends his works a quiet, unobtrusive persuasiveness today.

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg died in Copenhagen in 1853. His influence on Danish painting was so fundamental that he is still regarded today as its true teacher - an artist who developed an independent and unmistakable pictorial language from his encounter with the great European tradition.