Beyond the Light, Metropolitan Museum review — how Danish painters forged a unique national style

A wooden pier leans awkwardly over a lake, its spindly legs enveloped in marsh grass. Across the water, Copenhagen juts towards an amber sky, more a spasm of sooty brushstrokes than a sharply defined skyline. On the milky expanse between shores, a comma-sized man rows a lonely boat. The city appears as both smudge and chimera, and Christen Købke’s 1838 painting of it, too, floats between the ordinary and the transcendent, neutral reality edging into exalted metaphor.

A similar process is at work in Martinus Rørbye’s 1830 vista of Viborg in central Jutland. Again, we see the city from afar as a shadowed strip between pale sea and pale sky. Only the double-towered cathedral rears into a recognisable silhouette, violating the horizontal stripes and giving the scene its single shot of vigour. Rørbye, like Købke, has discovered the magic in topographical fact, transforming spires and turrets into a tremor that is barely detectable through the haze. In both paintings, the mood is contemplative and suffused with longing. As the poet Novalis had pointed out a generation earlier, “Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all become Romantic.”

These evocative paintings glow quietly in the Metropolitan Museum’s Beyond the Light, a survey of 19th-century Danish artists who basked in newfound nationalism even as they watched their homeland’s global power shrink. The exhibition confines its scope to the kingdom’s borders — but widen the angle even slightly and you can see that, in their search for a uniquely Danish spirit, these painters alchemised elements from all over Europe. The neoclassical contours and precise draughtsmanship of Jacques-Louis David, the exalted spiritualism of Caspar David Friedrich, Constable’s concentrated, quivering immersion into nature, Turner’s wild stabs at sublimity — these and other influences fused into the Danes’ hushed and luminous aesthetic.

Curators Freyda Spira, Stephanie Schrader and Thomas Lederballe position the works in a historical and political context. In the aftermath of the devastating Napoleonic wars, Denmark transitioned from absolute monarchy to constitutional democracy. The times called for a new style capable of fusing patriotism and naturalism, with a dash of backward-looking pride. To counter the ravages of modernity and sing the wilderness where the old myths dwelled, painters omitted signs of militarisation, industrialisation and even farming. Close observation was a sacred task, subject to judicious self-editing.

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts acted as the crucible of this rejuvenated age, training artists to perfect their craft and use it to preserve and immortalise the nation. This new direction was spearheaded by the academy’s greatest eminence, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, who preached the thorough study of nature.

As a young man, Eckersberg had lived in Paris and studied privately with David, then travelled to Rome, where he committed ancient monuments to memory and imbibed the plein air spirit. Many of the painters in the Met show were his students, and he exhorted them to obey the rules of mathematical perspective and produce scrupulous records of transient moments. He advocated a vision of the ideal; to reach it, he bent nature into alignment with his calculations.

The Met has assembled an oversupply of Eckersbergs, which collectively are as enervating as a drab February day. The precision he insisted on saps vitality from his boats, harbours and views from Copenhagen’s Charlottenborg Palace. His line is too keen, his compositions too pristine; he has forced life’s ordinary disarray into deathly order.

His more astute acolytes, however, managed to free themselves from the aridity of his example, replacing it with expressive idiosyncrasy. Not that they embraced sloppiness. All through the 1830s and 1840s, they discovered that the harder they looked and the more detail they reproduced, the more emotion could flow into their work. “Painting is but another word for feeling,” Constable remarked in 1820, and over the next couple of decades the Danish nationalists kept rediscovering the same wisdom.

It’s too bad that the curators have omitted the foreigners whose spirits preside over the show in absentia. For Romantics such as Turner and Friedrich, the sailing ship operated as a symbol of hope, destiny and the passage through life. For Eckersberg, it was merely an object: in his meticulous and matter-of-fact “Hull Under Construction” from 1827, ribs and spine take stolid shape, doggedly avoiding any hint of lyricism.

A few years later, Rørbye, who was one of his students, travelled to the scene of a wreck in a remote corner of the country, made copious sketches and painted it as a ravaged, half-submerged skeleton. For all his reportorial accuracy, he also endowed “Wreck on the Northern Beach, Sank on May 9, 1832” with an appropriately sombre aura. The once-sound body, now broken by experience, lies baking in the mud, circled by predatory birds. For Eckersberg, the ship was a machine; for Rørbye, an emblem of mortality.

The tree was another motif that migrated northward from the studios of German Romantics. In his “Limewood Tree” (c1838), Købke uses the tree’s leaflessness to highlight its distinctive anatomy. Branches resemble human bones. Tiny twigs twist like exposed nerves. You can feel Købke’s intense empathy for this old and battered plant, which he draws like a portrait and imbues with complexity and character.

Lorenz Frølich painted a similarly venerable but slightly less tragic “Large Oak”, standing apart from the forest. It’s a portrait of an individual who has reached great age, not without suffering. Scattered dead sections coexist with animate branches, a reminder that even this old great oak will eventually fall and nourish a new generation.

Danish painters also adopted the Romantic metaphor of the window as artist’s eye, mediating and rearranging nature’s raw materials. Friedrich invented the genre in 1805 when he penned two sepia drawings of the view from his Dresden studio. In a third work, his wife Caroline leans out towards the riverscape and a passing mast. Her face is hidden, but we look over her shoulder and share her dreaminess.

Eckersberg visited Friedrich in Dresden in 1816. Nearly four decades later, near the end of his life, he drew his two daughters from the back, gazing out of his studio window towards the courtyard beyond. The painters’ sensibilities couldn’t be more different. Eckersberg imposes an unyielding geometry on the scene, with horizontals and verticals that snap into place and perspectival lines that duly converge on a vanishing point. Yet somehow this image transcends its compositional rigidity, radiating a wistful remembrance of the children these two young women had once been. The artist paints them like girls, miniaturised by a high sill and a vast window. They bend their heads over a sheet of paper and we follow their gaze, not out to the unknown, but inward to their private huddle.

The muted national style lasted for many years. In 1912, Vilhelm Hammershøi was still busy uniting Friedrich’s romantic yearnings with Eckersberg’s monochrome rigour in “Interior with an Easel, Bredgade 25”. It’s a work of gorgeous bleakness, sapped of colour but full of feeling. A weak winter light sidles in from the left, its angled rays slicing across the gridded greys of bare floor, wall and door. A black easel stands apart like a lone mourner at a funeral and a framed landscape painting hovers near the ceiling as if it had floated up there and got stuck. In this one straggler of a canvas, we take in the 19th-century lifecycle of melancholy, from source to habitat, through work in progress, to the final product of exquisite gloom.

To April 16, metmuseum.org