ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMANN
(Warsaw 1819 – 1881 Copenhagen)

An Icelandic Girl


Signed and dated, lower right: Elisabet Jerichau/ Baumann/ 1851.

Inscribed on the reverse of the stretcher: Fra Rønningesøgaard

Oil on canvas
38 ⅝ x 26 ⅝ inches (98 x 68 cm)

Provenance:   

The Artist; by whom sold to:
Count Henrik Bille-Brahe (1798-1875) (300 Reichsdaler); by descent to his son:
Baron Preben Charles Bille-Brahe-Selby (1842–1918), Hvedholm, Faaborg, Denmark and later Rønningesøgaard, Ullerslev, Denmark; by descent to his son:
Daniel Bille-Brahe-Selby (1878–1950), Rønningesøgaard, Denmark; by descent to his son:
Baron Bent Daniel Bille-Brahe-Selby (1919–2000), Rønningesøgaard, Denmark; by descent until 2023.

Exhibition:

The Royal Danish Academy Exhibition, Charlottenborg Palace, Copenhagen, 1851, no. 123.
“Malerier Fra Fyenske Herregaarde,” Odense Museums, 15 May – 15 June 1904, no. 40.

Literature:

Nicolaj Bøgh, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann: En Karakteristik, 1886, pp. 217-218, note 1.
Fortegnelse over de ved Det Kongelige Akademi for de skønne Kunster offentligt udstillede Kunstvaerker, Copenhagen, 1851, p. 10, cat. no. 123, “En Islandsk Pige” (An Icelandic Girl).

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was arguably the most important woman artist in nineteenth-century Scandinavia, but her career and legacy were achieved only through perseverance amid prejudice due both to her gender and her birth outside of Denmark.   By virtue of her own travels from Poland to Germany to Italy to Denmark to England and the Middle East, her paintings were of remarkably varied subjects: portraits, genre paintings, allegories, Orientalist fantasies, and, most personally and identifiably, mermaids.  Even as her work was acclaimed across Europe, she introduced into Danish art fresh ideas from the rest of the continent. Still, while her career flourished at home, she would later be criticized for painting “un-Danish pictures.”[i] As Karina Lykke Grand recently remarked of her, “Denmark was not ready for strong women with a European outlook.”

She achieved considerable success as a portraitist, and painted several members of European royalty and aristocracy, as well as fellow artists and other notable people of her time. An intimate Self-portrait at age thirty-one reveals the sensitivity of Baumann, both as artist and subject, while a later portrait photograph presents her as a consummate professional, at a table easel—brush, palette and mahlstick in hand—intently studying the subject that she is painting (Figs. 1-2). Baumann was also deeply engaged in the cause of women’s emancipation and in redefining the position of women within the arts and in other vocations.[ii] She was among the first female members of the Danish Royal Academy of Arts.

Though based in Copenhagen from 1849, Baumann exhibited at major exhibitions from the 1850s on: she contributed paintings to the Salon in Paris over several years, and to the World’s Fair in Paris (1855 and 1867), in London (1862), Amsterdam (1867), Berlin (1866), Vienna (1873), and Milan (1881).[iii]

In 1852 she was invited to exhibit her paintings at the Bridgewater Gallery in London, the celebrated residence of the Earl of Ellesmere and home to one of the greatest Old Master collections of the age, with masterpieces by Raphael and Titian on view.  There her works caught the attention of Queen Victoria, who requested a private exhibition at Buckingham Palace and later acquired her Icelandic Maiden (Fig. 3).[iv] Victoria kept the painting in her private residence on the Isle of Wight, Osborne House, where it remains today.

While in the Royal Collection, the painting was evidently re-titled The Norwegian Widow, and its original context of an Icelandic woman dressed in national costume was forgotten. While the title of the painting when exhibited at the Bridgewater Gallery is not known, as no catalogue survives, a review of the exhibition in the Times records the subject: “the lovers of simple natural beauty will not fail to be attracted by the portrait of an Icelandic maiden, in her national Sunday suit, holding her Psalm book in her hand—a picture which for the tenderness and truthfulness of execution seems to us worthy of the highest praise.”

Our painting, boldly signed and dated 1851, is titled En islandsk pige, or An Icelandic Girl (Fig. 4). The subject—a beautiful young woman of pale complexion, blue eyes, and braided blond hair—is dressed in the traditional Icelandic dress of the time. She wears a black woolen coat and skirt known as a peysuföt, often worn as Sunday dress. Wrapped about her neck is a black silk bowtie (in Icelandic, a slilfsi), and she holds a book, likely a prayer-book or bible, in her hands. Especially characteristic is the “tail-cap” on her head, known as a skotthúfa, which features a tassel (a skúfur) running through a gold cylinder called a skúfhólkur. Contemporary versions of this traditional costume are little changed (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. A young Icelandic woman wearing traditional dress with skúfhólkur at center.

Jerichau Baumann’s version of her portrait of an Icelandic woman was painted in 1851 and exhibited at the Royal Danish in that same year.[v] The work depicts the sitter half-length and in three-quarter profile, seated on an intricate wooden chair that is modeled on the 16th-century Icelandic church chairs from Grund. One of the pair is in the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavík (Fig. 6) and its mate is in the National Museum in Denmark (Fig. 7), where it must have been seen by the artist.

Interestingly, in the 19th century traditional Icelandic costumes were closely associated in Iceland with the movement for independence from Denmark, which reached new heights in 1851 when the Danes attempted to pass legislation dismissing the appeals of Icelanders. It is enticing to consider that Baumann would have had this context in mind when first painting her portrait of an Icelandic woman in that year, as the artist long had an interest in the struggles for independence playing out across Europe in the period. As a child Baumann experienced the upheaval of revolutionary Poland and her early works were drawn from the struggles of Polish life during her country’s rebellion against Russia.[vi] Additionally, several paintings from her Italian period and later also deal directly with this subject, including her portrait of an Italian revolutionary and her celebrated Italy of 1859, which symbolized the turmoil of Italy before its unification.[vii]

Baumann frequently returned to the same compositions throughout her career and painted multiple versions of her paintings—often with changes rather than as exact replicas. Our painting and the Royal Collection version exhibit differences in their dimensions, as well as in the disposition and characterization of the figure and the treatment of light in the environs in which the subject appears. Most immediately recognizable are the changes in the direction of the widow’s gaze (upturned rather than direct in our painting) and the pattern of her braided hair, which has been reversed. Another version with an arched top, signed and dated 1852, is in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Fig. 8). This painting is considerably different in conception as a half-length depiction of the sitter with significant changes to the chair and the position of the hands.

According to Nicolaj Bøgh, Jerichau Baumann painted five depictions of Icelandic women, and according to him “all these pictures are different.”[viii] Bøgh records the purchasers of all of these works, noting that one of the versions was purchased from the artist by the Danish Count Bille-Brahe. The inscription on the reverse of the original stretcher, “Fra Rønningesøgaard,” suggests that our work came from the manor house of that name, located on the Danish island of Funen, which belonged to the Bille-Brahe family from the late 19th century. The Bille-Brahe Icelandic woman was included in a 1904 exhibition of works of art from collections on the island of Funen, but unfortunately the catalogue does not record the date or dimensions of the work. As our work has recently emerged from a Danish aristocratic collection and all four other depictions by Jerichau Baumann of Icelandic women are accounted for, our painting is almost certainly identifiable with the painting sold to Count Bille-Brahe.

The painting is presented in its original frame, made in the workshop of Peder Christian Damborg (1801–1865), the renown Danish frame-maker. Damborg’s label is affixed to the lower center of the reverse of the frame (Fig. 9). On it he is designated as Royal Court Gilder and Frame-maker, and his address given as 105 St. Strandstræde, Copenhagen, the location of his studio from 1830 until his death in 1865.[ix] Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was a close friend of Damborg; her sympathetic portrait of him, dated 1853, is now in the Design Museum Denmark, Copenhagen (Fig. 10).

[i] By Emil Hannover, as quoted by Karina Lykke Grand, cited above, p. 48.
[ii] Max Bendixen, Verdensdamen Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann: En Glemt Verdensberømthed, Højbjerg, 2011, p. 14.
[iii] Jerzy Miskowiak, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann: Nationalromantikkens Enfant Terrible, Frederiksberg, 2018, p. 14.
[iv] RCIN 403883, https://www.rct.uk/collection/403883/the-norwegian-widow. See: Miskowiak, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, p. 50. Her success in England is demonstrated by the ten pages devoted to her in Ellen Clayton’s English Female Artists (London 1876), pp. 98-107.[v] The spelling of the artist’s name in the signature, “Elisabet Baumann Jerichau,” with her first name excluding the final “H,” was one often employed on her paintings.
[vi] Max Bendixen, Verdensdamen Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann: En Glemt Verdensberømthed, Højbjerg, 2011, p. 51.
[vii] Miskowiak, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, p. 102.
[viii] Nicolaj Bøgh, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann: En Karakteristik, 1886, p. 218.
[ix] On Damborg, see Jannie Henriette Linnemann, “The ideal craftsman: the Danish court gilder Peder Christian Damborg (1801-65),”The Frame Blog (https://theframeblog.com/tag/peder-christian-damborg/)