PRINCIPAL VERSION OR REPLICA? EXAMINING MARTINUS RØRBYE’S PRACTICE WHEN COPYING OTHERS OR HIS OWN PAINTINGS
He had a significant impact on almost all young Danish painters during the next three decades, including Rørbye.4 The beginning of this survey, however, takes as its starting point the summer of 2012 when a private collector offered the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (SMK) a painted sketch (Fig. 1a) for a large Eckersberg painting hanging at Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen, depicting Adolf, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Declines the Offer to Accede to the Danish Throne (Fig. 1b).5 This was the first of a series of four paint-ings executed by Eckersberg during the years 1819–28. In the composition, we see the aged Duke Adolf of Schleswig-Holstein receiving a delegation comprising a bishop, a nobleman and a representative of the third estate. Eckersberg shows the moment when the duke declines becoming king of Denmark and instead proposes his nephew, Count Christian of Oldenburg, who took the throne as Christian I. In the paint-ing, Duke Adolf points to a full-scale painting of his nephew Christian on the back wall.
When the private collector presented SMK with the painted sketch for the large painting at Christiansborg, the gift was seen as an excellent opportunity to complement its collection with examples of artists’ works relating to his-tory paintings commissioned by the Danish royal house. It should be noted that archival sources show that the patron who commissioned the paintings, King Frederik VI, was very keen to have the ‘story’ painted according to verified and current knowledge. Therefore the historian Ove Malling (1747–1829) was assigned to assist Eckersberg in rendering the scenes accurately, which included painting their clothing faithfully for the period. This made the work difficult and time- consuming, as Eckersberg had to change the image according to Malling’s interventions. Eckersberg received the commis-sion in mid-1817 and six months later he presented the first drawn sketches featuring the story of Duke Adolf. Later, in 1819, he presented the first painted sketch, but was asked to make significant changes, which he could present for approval one month later.
When SMK acquired the abovementioned oil sketch, we were aware that a presumably earlier painted sketch of the subject was kept in a private collection (Fig. 1c).6 Several compositional elements in this painting differ significantly from the large painting in Christiansborg Palace and from the recently acquired oil sketch of the same subject. This is the reason why SMK researchers at first thought that the latter could be Eckersberg’s last and reworked version, which was translated directly to the large canvas. However, something did not quite fit the story. There is no clear documentation supporting the existence of a second version: in Eckersberg’s own time only one sketch was mentioned, and there is no reference to a second version either in his diary or in other con-temporary sources. The attribution of the recently acquired version to Eckersberg can only be traced to the early or mid-20th century, yet the catalogue of the Eckersberg sale in 1854 confirms that he owned a copy of this finished painting, exe-cuted by his student Martinus Rørbye. This raised doubt as to the attribution of the oil sketch to Eckersberg, and specula-tion as to whether it could be a faithful copy by Rørbye. This question prompted a desire to fully understand whether the painting offered to SMK did indeed reflect Eckersberg’s work-ing procedure and artistic considerations or if it was in fact painted by an ambitious student striving to attain the quality of his master.
Thanks to the owner of the first Eckersberg sketch, who was willing to loan his painting for examination, both oil sketches could undergo careful and comparable investigation using infrared reflectography (IRR).7 In the version kept in a pri-vate collection, the IRR image (Fig. 2a) revealed a very detailed sketch beneath the paint. A ruler had been used in many places to achieve the correct perspective and architecture including a chequered floor that was later covered by the green carpet.
A squaring of the entire composition was revealed using IRR;
this was intended to aid the transfer of the small sketch to the large canvas planned for the palace. Surprisingly, it also uncov-ered a sketched female figure seated on the throne behind Fig. 1 (a) M. Rørbye, Adolf, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Declines the Offer to Accede to the Danish Throne, 1825–26, oil on canvas, 47.2 × 36.5 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, KMS8676. (b) C.W. Eckersberg, Adolf, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Declines the Offer to Accede to the Danish Throne, 1821, oil on canvas, 309 × 249 cm, Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen. (c) C.W. Eckersberg, Adolf, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Declines the Offer to Accede to the Danish Throne, 1819, oil on canvas, 46 × 39 cm, private collection. (Photo © SMK.)
a b c
JØRGEN WADUM, TROELS FILTENBORG, KASPER MONRAD AND JESPER SVENNINGSEN
Duke Adolf, something the historian Malling would surely have found most unsuitable for the composition.
By contrast, the IRR of the second version, closest in appearance to the final work at Christiansborg Palace, revealed a very tempered underdrawing almost identical to the fin-ished work at the palace (Fig. 2b). Small dots along all sides of the canvas indicate squaring-up that cannot be detected by the IR camera, suggesting the possible use of threads instead of traced lines. No changes in or development to the com-plex composition can be observed, something that would be expected had this been Eckersberg’s autograph second ver-sion therefore the underdrawing must reflect the work of a devoted student, Rørbye, and his method of copying one of his master’s works. This must be the copy mentioned in the Eckersberg sale catalogue as executed by Rørbye.
To confirm this information and to discover how Rørbye copied his master, another work by the artists – a copy after Eckersberg’s original View into a Yard in Rome (Fig. 3) – was examined.8 This Roman courtyard was painted by Eckersberg in 1813–16, somewhat earlier than the Christiansborg history painting described above. Rørbye’s faithful copy of the View into a Yard in Rome from c.1825 at SMK9 (Fig. 4a) was con-sequently examined by IR imaging, which demonstrated that it appears precisely and carefully copied in a way comparable to the underdrawing in his copy of the history painting (Fig.
4b). Zooming in on the IR reflectogram, Rørbye’s use of ruler and pen for the meticulous tracing of his master’s motif can be observed. The vertical line of the receding wall with the large and small windows at the left is also visible through the roof over the small window. No sketchy tracing of the com-position or its shadow areas is detectable, if present at all; the
contour lines alone seem to have been sufficient for the copy-ing of the scene.
This method of drawing is comparable to the way Rørbye habitually finished his drawn sketches. Apart from a little wash, he often applied a very controlled line drawing in ink over the sketchier initial composition. In the drawing of An Artist Painting at a Shipyard (Fig. 5)10 from about the same time as the copy after Eckersberg’s Roman view, the initial drawing was in pencil and shadows are indicated by careful hatching made from repeated narrow tilted curves without lifting the pencil from the paper. At first glance this appears just as a rudimentary element, since other shadows have been indicated by a thin wash.
Greeks Working in the Ruins of the Acropolis, a drawing that Rørbye executed about a decade later, displays a com-parable drawing technique.11 The composition was captured using pencil, and although the contours were not drawn over using ink, the shading was carried out by means of the same controlled hatching and as in the drawing of the shipyard, where a light wash was applied. Later the drawing from the Acropolis served as an almost exact model for an underdraw-ing for a paintunderdraw-ing of almost identical size and of the same subject.12 As the figures in the painting differ from those in the drawing it seems that only the architectural outlines were copied onto a new sheet of oiled paper. Apart from a few pentimenti – such as an alteration to the contours of a few architectural elements and a change in one of the fragmented columns piled up at the right foreground – the underdrawing shows little sign of sketching or hatching. Based on this obser-vation, the tracing of a composition would seem to have been a method Rørbye employed when transferring a composition from a preliminary drawing to a canvas.
Fig. 2 (a) C.W. Eckersberg, Adolf, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Declines the Offer to Accede to the Danish Throne: IRR image of Fig, 1c. (b) M. Rørbye, Adolf, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Declines the Offer to Accede to the Danish Throne: IRR image of Fig. 1a.
a b
PRINCIPAL VERSION OR REPLICA? EXAMINING MARTINUS RØRBYE’S PRACTICE WHEN COPYING OTHERS OR HIS OWN PAINTINGS