Provenance:

Private Collection, Denmark, until 2018, when acquired by:
Private Collection, New York, 2018–2025.

This striking painting of an ancient sculpture is the work of Christen Dalsgaard, one of the most appealing painters of the Danish Golden Age. Known primarily for his landscapes and genre scenes recording daily life, Dalsgaard began his career studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and Martinus Rørbye. It was there that the artist, following the traditional course of study, painted our canvas, using as his model a work in the famed plaster cast collection of the Academy. Dalsgaard’s friend and colleague Julius Exner portrayed students drawing from the casts in his celebrated canvas of 1843 (Fig. 1).  

Dalsgaard’s model was a cast of an ancient Roman bust depicting a personification of Comedy. The original marble bust—together with its mate, a depiction of Tragedy— have long been in the Vatican Museums in the Sala Rotunda of the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Hall of the Muses (Figs. 2-3).[i] These sculptures were discovered at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli in 1735 by its then owner, Giuseppe Fede. According to the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Battista Visconti, the busts were recovered near the entrance to the Greek Theatre, a small oval plan theatre set amongst a garden within the emperor’s residential complex. Both works are sculpted with the facial features of the Roman noblewoman Salonia Matidia (68–119 AD)—in this case as a representation of Thalia, Muse of Comedy. While the Academy’s cast collection survives and is now part of the Statens Museum for Konst (Fig. 4), the cast of Comedy is lost.[ii]

Figs. 2-3. Roman, 2nd Century, Comedy and Tragedy, marble, Vatican Museums.

Cast drawing and painting was and remains a critical aspect of the academic training of artists. It provides the fundamentals of translating three-dimensional objects into the two dimensions of paper or canvas, while allowing the artist to explore and understand the subtleties of light and shadow. Dalsgaard’s painting is exceptional in its refinement and elegance, elevating it from being a student exercise to a striking independent work of great quality. That it was painted by a 21-year-old artist at the outset of his career makes it all the more remarkable.[iii]

Dalsgaard went on to have a distinguished career in the Danish capital. He became member of the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts 1872, was made a knight of the Danebrog Order in 1879, and received the title of professor at the Academy in 1892. Dalsgaard belonged to the generation that forged Danish nationalism, and his paintings focused on sympathetic depictions of his fellow countryman in at-times emotionally laden situations. But here, at the outset of his career, his focus was on understanding the pure forms of classical art and translating them into his own time, with a resonance that survives to today.

[i] A closely related sculpture of Comedy after the Vatican example is held in the Museum del Prado, Spain. It entered the Royal Collection in 1801 as a gift to Carlos IV from José Nicolás de Azara. https://www.
museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/salonia-matidia-as-thalia-muse-of-comedy/68246d99-7fa5-45ba-a661-15deff61f5f8?searchid=38c442e0-9eec-3852-e8a1-18b82464da0b.

[ii] The counterpart cast of Tragedy survives in the collection (inv. DEP428).

[iii] Dalsgaard was born on 30 October 1824. He began his studies at the Academy in 1841, entered the freehand drawing program in 1843, and the academy plaster school in 1844. On 18 March 1846, Dalsgaard moved from working from plaster casts to drawing after live models, so the painting likely dates from early in the year.