Patricia G. Berman’s In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century is a beautiful book about an area of nineteenth-century art that is little known outside of Denmark. Although Robert Rosenblum and Kirk Varnedoe laid the groundwork for understanding the work in a larger European context, the scholarship and publications in English have been modest. Berman rectifies this situation with her well-illustrated and comprehensive book. In Another Light offers an overview of a range of discourses in Danish art, which Berman analyzes as she locates the works in their broader socio-cultural context. When applicable, Berman brings in examples of contemporary writers and fellow artists, as well as inspirational cultural and political figures, to better present the full scope of the artists’ undertakings. She makes references to recent Danish scholarship in the field, and anchors the artists’ work within European art, as she maps out the Danish artists’ inspirations from and interactions with British, Dutch, German, and French contemporaries.

Using one painting as a focus for each chapter, Berman weaves the chapters together using thorough visual analysis, contextual information, and references to current scholarship. She begins and ends the book with discussions of the perhaps best-known painter, Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose monochromatic canvases have drawn significant recent attention in English-speaking countries. In the first chapter, entitled “The Making of a Danish Tradition,” Berman opens with a discussion of Hammershøi’s painting Amalienborg Square, Copenhagen (1896) in order to introduce the previous century’s tradition and explain how the early nineteenth-century artists sought to break away from the strict rules of the Academic and Neoclassical tradition. The painting shows a part of the royal residence in Copenhagen depicted in Hammershøi’s famous grayish yet luminous tones. An equestrian statue of King Frederik V is the central figure of the composition, a monument in the center of a civic square. However, as Berman points out, it is placed slightly off center on the canvas and somewhat to the right, appearing odd, dim, and not very celebratory of a prominent king. Berman argues that such non-heroic treatment of a political leader reflects Hammershøi’s ambivalence as well as a generally growing criticism of the Danish monarchy. Using Hammershøi’s painting as a key allows Berman to move into a discussion of previous traditions of portraiture and history painting (often under the patronage of the royal court), introducing the eighteenth-century professors at the Royal Academy, Jens Juel (portrait painter) and Nikolai Abraham Abildgaard (history painter).

Berman’s organization of each chapter around one particular painting is both an intriguing and a creative way of thinking about each of the periods. Particularly informative are her discussions of the different artistic communities that formed throughout the century. Three chapters, each devoted to a single group, cover the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, the artists working around Bertel Thorvaldsen in Rome, and the late nineteenth-century artists’ community in the village Skagen in northern Denmark. For all three groups of artists, Berman chooses a painting that shows the artists together, known as a “freundshaft bilder” (friendship paintings), from which the excitement, engagement, and artists’ milieus can be understood. Thus the second chapter, entitled “The Royal Academy of the Golden Age,” starts off with a painting by Wilhelm Bendts entitled Life Class at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Copenhagen (1826). Here the camaraderie between the artists is clearly visible, as they discuss, paint, and are deeply involved with direct studies of the figure and human anatomy. The painting, Berman argues, represents a shift away from the tradition of history painting as it celebrates everyday life in the studio and suggests that the heroism of human beings can be found in common life. Although the model the students are painting is situated in a heroic pose that mimics the classical tradition, the position of a man fixing the light fixtures right behind him almost exactly echoes the model’s stance. The equal treatment of the model and the handyman exemplifies the Academy turning away from its grand tradition and shifting its focus toward painting the ordinary, searching for authenticity, and, with it, the goal of developing what was perceived to be a particularly Danish school.

It is a different group of friends yet a similarly friendly atmosphere that is discussed by Berman in the following chapter, entitled “Rome as an International Academy.” Here she opens with Ditlev Conrad Blunck’s Danish Artists in the Osteria La Gensola in Rome (ca. 1836), which strikingly presents a new cosmopolitanism and optimism in its view of Danish artists relaxing, interacting, and enjoying a break in a small Roman trattoria. A key figure around whom the discussions and composition revolve is the well-known Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, whose circle of artist friends represents an intimate group of painters and sculptors working in Rome and thereby outside the rules of the Danish academy. Berman quotes the poet and fairytale storyteller Hans Christian Andersen commenting on how the Danish artists in Rome were able to free themselves from the often restrictive rules of home. Perhaps inspired by his own experiences, Andersen commented on how these same artists would later return to Denmark, capable of exploring the country’s material culture and cultural fabric with new and fresh eyes. To the Danes, Thorvaldsen was soon perceived as a key leader in the arts and even as an embodiment of a new Danish nobility. They built a museum for him and celebrated his homecoming as a national hero in 1833, and commemorated him again at his death in 1844. Although Berman explores Thorvaldsen as an individual artist, her focus is mainly on Thorvaldsen in terms of his influence on the group of early nineteenth-century Danish painters around him in Rome. As she explores a number of the artists and their individual works, it becomes clear why and how prolifically each of the artists would draw from Thorvaldsen.

Berman’s choice for the chapter devoted to the artists’ community in Skagen is P. S. Krøyer’s Hip, Hip, Hurrah! (1888), a painting that largely mimics Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s famous painting Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) in composition, color scheme, and impressionistic brushstrokes. The Norwegian-born artist features the Skagen artists’ community in a birthday celebration, cheering and singing as they eat outdoors. The painting beautifully conveys a sense of a summer afternoon in the small fisherman’s village on the tip of the peninsula Jutland where the two seas (Skagerak and Kattegat, or the North Sea and the straits of Denmark) meet in a clashing of waves, and where the light has a very distinctive quality. Also a “freundshaft bilder,” it shows visual artists and writers from the five Nordic countries coming together in a scene familiar to any Danish citizen at the time. In fact, birthday celebrations remain important family events in Denmark. Family and friends gather around the dinner table, and songs are written that celebrate the particular birthday person involved. Speeches are prepared and toasts are common, exactly as the toast is depicted in Krøyer’s painting. But here the celebration is one of a community of modern artists gathered together as a unique and slightly odd kind of family (although some were indeed family, married to one another).

Berman discusses how Skagen was considered a laboratory for the artists trying to form a Danish identity following the war of Schlesvig Holstein (1864), in which Denmark lost a large part of its southern border to the Germans. The artists considered Skagen to be a piece of an unspoiled Denmark, and likened it to a desert between two oceans similar to the African desert, or even another Pompeii. For example, the medieval Sct. Laurentii church (on the outskirts of Skagen), buried as a result of migratory dunes, reminded Andersen of Pompeii, whereas the Norwegian poet Holger Drachman wrote about Skagen as an at once “dangerous natural paradise” and at the same time inspiring “eldorado” for the artists.

The ties to French Impressionism are obvious in Krøyer’s painting, and Berman notes how the Norwegian Impressionist painter Fritz Thaulow was not only a conduit for French Impressionism but also helped create a network between the Danish and their French counterparts. The Skagen artists also worked in artists’ colonies in France and other countries. Paul Gauguin’s circle in Pont Aven, for example, drew several of the Skagen painters, while others traveled to Paris, Berlin, and London, and sent their works to the Exposition Universelle (1878). However, French critics dismissed their work as retrograde and provincial.

Of the few women discussed in the book, the Skagen painter Anna Ancher (married to Michael Ancher) and Marie Krøyer (married to P. S. Kroeyer) play a considerable role as women artists responsible for some of the more important paintings at the time. Anna Ancher’s famous genre scenes featuring women in domestic settings are perhaps some of the most celebrated images in today’s Danish popular culture. Berman discusses two beautiful joint paintings, which continue the book’s theme of “freundshaft bilder,” now with a married couple (Anna and Michael Ancher) painting one another in a double portrait entitled Contemplating the Day’s Work (1883) and P. S. and Marie Krøyer in Double Portrait of Marie and P. S. Krøyer (1890). Berman points to the brushstroke and treatment of the two as significant for their portrayal of one another, as well as more generally for the latter-day positions and perceptions of women’s role in art. Marie Krøyer’s portrayal of her husband is one of a determined and self-assured man, while her significant other portrays her primarily as a young and beautiful woman.

Berman ends the book with a chapter on Hammershøi, an artist already familiar to the reader from the opening. Discussing his characteristic interiors that are at once gray and shimmering with a dim and rainy Northern light, Berman points to striking comparisons with the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s interiors, rediscovered by Hammershøi and others at this time.

In Another Light presents interesting, important material in ways that inform in a compelling and succinct manner both the art historian and the curious non-expert. It is a clear and accessible introduction to a mostly neglected aspect of nineteenth-century European art.