CHRISTEN KØBKE
1810 – Copenhagen – 1848
PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG SAILOR WITH FOLDED ARMS
pencil on paper, 175 x 140 mm
date: 1837
provenance:
Publisher Jørgen Jokum Smith, 1920-1980, Copenhagen;
by descent;
private collection, Sweden;
Fine Art and Antiques, Bruun Rasmussen, Copenhagen, 29 November 2022, lot 193.
The drawing presents a young man shown half-length, with his arms crossed and his body turned slightly to the side while he looks directly at the viewer. He wears a soft cap and a jacket with broad sleeves, rendered with light, economical lines. Christen Købke focuses on the face, which is carefully modeled while the clothing is rendered more summarily. The restrained pose and minimal background emphasize the sitter’s calm expression and lend the image a quiet, introspective character.
This portrait shows a young sailor whom Købke portrayed during a journey to the Danish island of Bornholm. In the autumn of 1837, Købke traveled there together with his close friend, the sculptor Hermann Ernst Freund. The closed pose with crossed arms functions compositionally as a means of directing the viewer’s attention to the face. By positioning the arms compactly in front of the body, the pictorial field is visually contained, establishing a clear compositional hierarchy. The body serves as a stable structural base, while the head above it is isolated and emphatically foregrounded. Købke created several portraits depicting sitter with their arms crossed, see fig. 1.
fig. 1 Christen Købke, Portrait of P. Ryder, Son of the Artist’s Cousin, 1848, oil on canvas, 74.5 x 53.5 cm, National Gallery, London, inv.no. L1101, private collection 2008.
Christen Købke was one of the leading figures of the Danish Golden Age, renowned for his refined depictions of everyday life, architecture, and landscape. Born in Copenhagen, he trained at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, whose emphasis on careful observation, clarity of light, and compositional balance profoundly shaped Købke’s artistic practice. Within this tradition, Købke also proved to be a masterful portraitist, creating intimate and psychologically sensitive likenesses distinguished by precision, restraint, and subtle color harmonies. His portraits, like his views of Copenhagen and domestic settings, transform familiar subjects into images of quiet presence and measured realism.
Despite his relatively brief career, cut short by his death at the age of thirty-seven, Købke produced a compact yet highly influential body of work. Today, he is recognized as a central figure of nineteenth-century Danish painting, whose quietly observed realism and exceptional command of portraiture exemplify the ideals of the Danish Golden Age and continue to resonate within European art history. Due to the artist’s short life his drawings are rare.
The attribution has kindly been confirmed by Thomas Lederballe from the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.