Nicolai Abildgaard

Biography

In February 1794 a fire broke out at Christiansborg Palace, and seven of the ten large pictures for the Knights' Room were destroyed. Abildgaard had worked on them for about fourteen years and regarded them as the main work of his life.

He received the commission around 1780, when he was royal history painter: the task was to show the history of Denmark, combining historical scenes with allegories and mythological motifs. Above the doors, four periods of European history were depicted in allegorical form. Most of the cycle survives only in sketches, which are kept in a Copenhagen museum.

He was born on 11 September 1743 in Copenhagen, the son of Anne Margrethe (née Bastholm) and Søren Abildgaard, a draughtsman of antiquities and scholar. His elder brother, Peter Christian, became a well-known veterinarian. Before entering the Royal Danish Academy of Art he studied with a painting master; at the academy his teachers were Johan Edvard Mandelberg and Johannes Wiedewelt. From 1764 to 1767 he won academy medals, and in 1767 the Large Gold Medal entitled him to a travel stipend. He could use it only five years later. Around 1769 he assisted Mandelberg, among other things with the decorative paintings at Fredensborg Palace. He lived in Rome from 1772 to 1777. He copied Annibale Carracci's frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese, studied Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo, and worked on sculpture, architecture, fresco technique, mythology, antiquities, anatomy and perspective. In 1776 he made a trip to Naples with Jens Juel. In Rome, in the circle of the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and Johann Heinrich Füssli, he began to move away from academic classicism, became absorbed in Shakespeare, Homer and Ossian, and turned to subjects from Norse as well as Greek mythology. Of his Roman works the best known is “The Wounded Philoctetes”, painted in 1774–1775; it shows Michelangelo's form and Titian's colour. In June 1777 he left Rome, stopped in Paris on the way, and arrived in Denmark in December.

He became a professor at the Academy in 1778. He taught painting, mythology and anatomy. In 1787 his attempt to become director failed, but in 1789 he was elected unanimously, and he headed the Academy until 1791 or 1792; he was director again from 1801 or 1802 until his death. Contemporaries called him domineering and inclined to take as many of the academy's commissions as he could for himself; at the same time he supported young artists, among them Thorvaldsen in his difficult years. His pupils included Asmus Jacob Carstens, Johan Ludvig Lund and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg; after his death Lund and Eckersberg took over professorships at the Academy.

He had a reputation as a religious freethinker and an advocate of reform. He supported the emancipation of the peasants, in 1792 took part in raising money for the Freedom Monument (Frihedsstøtten) and made the design for the monument itself, along with sketches for two reliefs at its base, and in 1789–1790 he tried to express revolutionary ideas in the decoration of the Knights' Room. The king rejected such designs. In 1794 his allegory “Jupiter Weighs the Fate of Mankind” was shown at an exhibition. After that, it is written, he found himself politically isolated, and the censors cut him off from public debate.

After the fire, commissions for pictures and the income from them stopped. But decorative work appeared, and a chance to act as an architect. In 1794–1798 he decorated Levetzau Palace (now Christian VIII's Palace) in the Amalienborg complex, where the sculptural work was directed by his pupil Bertel Thorvaldsen. The project to rebuild Christiansborg was not entrusted to him. He built himself a summer villa, Spurveskjul, near Frederiksdal to his own drawings, and in addition the house at Nytorv 5 and the Temple of Apis in Frederiksberg Gardens were built to his designs. He designed furniture in the “à la grecque” manner, with painted panels in the “red-figure style” taken from ancient vases; for his drawing of the klismos chair he is regarded as the first Danish artist to influence the decorative crafts.

At the start of the nineteenth century he returned to painting, producing four pictures after Terence's comedy “Andria”. In 1804 he received a commission for a series of paintings for the throne room of the new palace, but disagreements with the crown prince halted the work. He continued to design furniture and interiors for the court.

Abildgaard died on 4 June 1809 at Frederiksdal, near Copenhagen. He is buried in Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen.