Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

Christopher Wilhelm Eggersberg got his big breakthrough with dramatic paintings of Copenhagen's bombing in 1807. He earned it for his studies at the art academy by drawing for popular flyers moralizing everyday situations, people's life paintings and small erotica. To paint everyday motifs from goats and streets gave him the opportunity to go on long trips and get inspiration in and around Copenhagen at Vållene and in Havnen. With a travel scholarship he went on a pilgrimage to Paris and Rome in 1810-16. During these years he created large amounts of art and also threw himself over the open-air painting to draw directly after the motif in nature. He renewed Danish art with his city paintings from Rome. In 1818 he became a professor at the Royal Art Academy and moved to Charlottenborg. Here he lived and taught for 35 years among other things in open-air painting. Skønt Eggersberg was the most popular portrait artist in Copenhagen and portrayed several from the rich citizenship where he himself enjoyed marine paintings. Learned with meticulous and detailed reproductions of the river Skibe on a background of sea and sky with drifting clouds and varying weather conditions. Sky formations played a special role in Eggersberg's paintings. Because of them there were pleasant observations and studies of the formation of the clouds, colours and movements, and the changing light. He even wrote a special daily diary. His daughter, Julie Eggersberg, wrote in her memoirs about his father's weather studies. Fathers often painted weather studies from the open sea over the part of Charlottenborg that forms the corner of Kongsnyttog and Nyhavn. It was fun as a child to be up there with him. He lay on his back for a long time and stared up into the air and the clouds. Skøntmann at that time did not quite understand what he was staring at, but it turned out to be extremely interesting. Eggersberg wrote a diary for a large part of his life. He started when he was 27 years old in Toulouse, Paris and ended the first 43 years later. Throughout his life he went on long trips in Copenhagen and Maine, also during the cholera epidemic. While he noted the number of sick and dead in the city, he became ill himself. During his illness, his daughter wrote in her diary about the direction of the wind and the appearance of the clouds, and when she talked about a beautiful sunset one of the last evenings, it was also written down. Eggersberg died at 5 o'clock in the morning on July 22, as one of the cholera's 5,000 victims. He was lucky to be buried in his own cemetery, and not like most of the other victims, at the newly built Cholera Churchyard, the present-day Hans Taussens Park. A rational decision that was due to the prohibition that cholera victims should be buried 48 hours after the death was confirmed. Due to the risk of infection, the coffin was locked on Eggersberg's coffin, and no one was allowed to stay in the apartment. On the day of his funeral, only the dead were allowed to enter the house. Even the priest and the few who followed the coffin to the assistant churchyard were gathered outside on the street. As the father of the Danish Golden Age, Eggersberg influenced several generations of new artists, including Christian Købke and Vilhelm Marstrand. They are also buried at the assistant churchyard.