The oldest work is a self-portrait drawing in profile by the French artist Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée (1725– 1805). Over the course of his career, Lagrenée specialised above all in mythological subjects marked by a fairly austere classicism, but he also produced a smaller number of lively portraits, including a much-praised painting of himself, now in the collections of the Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki. In it, the artist appears with great self-assurance and confidence, like a bon vivant whose eyes radiate an engaging perspicacity. The work is signed “L. de Lagrenée arrivé à Rome le 13 nov. 175[0] peint pour luimême”. That same year Lagrenée had won a scholarship to study in the city. Although an old inscription on the verso states that it was done in 1778, the Nationalmuseum’s self-portrait drawing in profile seems very close to this painting, as if the artist had merely changed pose during the same “sitting”. In the drawing, though, Lagrenée depicts himself in a somewhat more subdued and sober way, seemingly taking a step back from his persona; his grand role as an artist. This impression is reinforced perhaps by the technique: the outlines of the profile are admittedly firmly drawn, but the work as a whole nevertheless exhibits a certain lightness of line. The artist returned to Paris in 1754 and although the drawn self-portrait was presumably done much later, it still demonstrates the skilled draughtsmanship he developed during his years in Italy. Lagrenée strikes us here as urbane, but perhaps also a little past his prime.

Portrait drawings are rare in Louis-Jean-François Lagrenées work, but an interesting comparable example with virtually identical dimensions, albeit showing the sitter three-quarterface, is his rendering of Alexander Roslin’s (1718–1793) daughter, Alexandrine Élisabeth, to be found in the Nationalmuseum’s Institut Tessin collection.

Olof Johan Södermark (1790–1848) was one of a successful group of painters and architects who started off as military officers and who were to play an important part in Swedish artistic life in the first half of the 19th century. They had been taught drawing at the Military Academy and in the Fortifications Corps, a forerunner of the Corps of Engineers, thereby receiving the beginnings of an artistic training into the bargain.4 Another of these artists with a military background, Hjalmar Mörner (1794–1837), urged Södermark to travel to Rome. From 1826 to 1829, Södermark stayed with the sculptor Johan Niclas Byström (1783–1848), whose Villa Malta was a hub for Scandinavian artists in the city. A few portraits by Södermark, among them images of his friends Mörner and Byström, but no self-portraits, were previously known from this, his first visit to Rome. The portrait considered here is signed “O. Södermark pinx Roma 1827”, and given that the sitter’s features recall both a later self-portrait in private ownership and Johan Gustaf Sandberg’s (1782–1854) portrait of a some years older, somewhat greying Södermark (painted in 1831), it may be assumed to be a selfportrait.

The fact that this work was not among the portraits from Rome which Södermark exhibited at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1831, a couple of years after his return home, may perhaps have to do with the constant doubts he felt about his own artistic ability. These were possibly coupled with misgivings about the obviously egocentric nature of self-portraiture, and hence about how such art should be presented in a public context.8 Another key challenge, perhaps, was that of allying the self-analytical nature of the self-portrait with the successful combination of portrait-like realism and idealisation which Södermark had mastered in his other portraits. Quite clearly, the concentrated – scrutinising – gaze so typical of the self-portrait is present here, reflecting, it seems, the character of a single-minded and ambitious artist. The painting is an important, and previously unknown, example of the portraits produced by this artist in Rome in the late 1820s.

Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818–1848) and Peter Christian Skovgaard (1817–1875) are regarded as two of the leading artists of the Danish Golden Age of the 19th century. They were close friends, and according to a later inscription the present drawing by Lundbye is a portrait of Skovgaard. A number of portraits of that artist by Lundbye were already known, showing the subject from different angles, in various emotional states and at different ages. In several of his drawings of his friend, Lundbye uses touches of watercolour to emphasise his reddish and often dishevelled hair and beard, a technique that also highlights the sitter’s high cheekbones.10 The fact that these features are not conspicuous in the Nationalmuseum drawing may invite questions about the sitter’s identity. There is no doubt, though, that the portraitist here is Lundbye. And probably the image does indeed originate from the context of his friendship with a fellow artist, but if we accept it as a portrait of a friend, then it is in fact more reminiscent of Lundbye’s earlier portraits of Lorenz Frølich (1820–1908). Either way, it would seem to be intended primarily to capture an emotional state of friendly intimacy and pensiveness on the part of the subject.

A less widely noted artist of Denmark’s Golden Age was Ludvig August Smith (1820–1906). His motives for devoting himself to portraiture were perhaps chiefly financial, but this was in fact a form of art he was very well suited to. With his accomplished rendering of light and shadow, he built shapes and volumes in the manner of earlier masters of chiaroscuro; a technique he had probably learnt in C. W. Eckersberg’s (1783–1853) life class in Copenhagen and which he employed to great effect in his portraits, including the one considered here (Fig. 7). The intense gaze suggests that this is a self-portrait and if that is so, it is the only one known by this artist.

Several of Smith’s portraits were originals for lithographs, drawn for Em. Bærentzen & Co, the leading lithographic workshop in Denmark at that time.13 Emil Bærentzen (1799–1868), the portraitist who managed the business, and his friend, the German miniaturist, lithographer and pioneering photographer Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (1805–1894), are also among the artists linked to the Danish Golden Age who figure in the present selection of portraits.14 Like Bærentzen, Stelzner presumably studied in Eckersberg’s life class in Copenhagen. They were later close associates during their time in Paris, as the greeting accompanying this drawing makes clear.15 It is probably a portrait of Bærentzen, drawn by Stelzner. In this sensitively executed rendering of his friend at the drawing board, he emphasises the things the two artists had in common: their delight in the meticulous detail of portraiture, in both prints and miniatures

The glimmer from the Danish Golden Age also formed the basis, through precursors like the artist Martinus Rørbye (1803– 1848), for the light of the Skagen painting of the turn of the century. Among those active at Skagen at that time was one of Scandinavia’s most prominent artist couples, Michael and Anna Ancher (1849–1927 and 1859–1935).16 Michael Ancher’s image of his wife painting a portrait in her studio (Fig. 9) reflects not only the professional common ground between artist and artistsitter, and the intimate trust between artist friends, but also the recognition and understanding which only love and family ties can bring. In this sense, the work recalls one of Ancher’s best-known portraits of his wife, Anna Ancher Teaching her Daughter Helga to Draw, with a Christmas Gnome as a Model (1888), in which Anna Ancher is also in the process of creating, in this case while instructing her daughter in the art of drawing. What is ingenious about the Nationalmuseum painting is that Michael Ancher’s portrait of his wife is at the same time a profile portrait of the woman she is painting. The image conveys, above all, a sense of absolute concentration; a concentration that grips Anna Ancher, her sitter, and undoubtedly, outside the picture, the artist behind the painting, her husband.