Købke is perhaps the foremost of the painters who make up the generation of Danish artists of what has become known as the “Golden Age“. They are contemporary with our Romantics, with a strong admixture of the contemporary German Biedermeyer: essentially middle-class, conscientiously true-to-life, almost puritanically dedicated to the unadorned reality of the everyday world and the doings of nice, inoffensive bourgeois folk.
Here, Købke shows us a scene entirely familiar to him, close to his home in Copenhagen, peopled by his own neighbours. He has chosen a pictorial idea almost ostentatiously undemonstrative, in which an unclouded afternoon sky is reflected in a still expanse of water. Two women are waiting on a jetty for the arrival of a rowing boat full of people, something imperceptible about their poses letting us know, somehow, that the event is important to them.
Or perhaps it’s the sheer placing of the group in the precise centre of the scene that conveys this information. They are looking away from us towards the rowing boat, poised between the land and the water, at the foot of a flag-staff on which the Danish flag flutters in a slight breath of air. On that flag, however, hangs something of a tale.
It’s a common sight in Denmark today to see the national flag displayed on a piece of private land, or at the water’s edge as it is here. It was a fashion that arose in the early 1830s, signalling revived national feeling after the political disruption of the Napoleonic period. This was encouraged by the king, Frederick VI, who had been, either as Regent or King, for some fifty years and so solidly represented the Danes and how they conceived themselves. His long reign ended in 1832 and he was succeeded by a cousin, Christian VIII, who was alarmed by such overt national feeling and in 1834 banned the use of flags by private individuals.
Although it occupies a central position in Købke’s serene composition, then, the Danish flag represents a contested set of political ideas. It reinforces the domesticity and essentially peaceable sentiments of the Danes whose daily life we are witnessing. But the wind that lazily stirs it seems to blow from that wide, not so empty sky.
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