Poul Schülein talks about Eckersberg's "A nude woman doing her hair before a mirror", 1841

My name is Paul Schulein, and I'm an architect, and from January 1st I will be the Royal Inspector of Buildings, and the Hirschbrunn Collection will be one of the buildings I have to work with. When you come into this room, obviously there's a wealth of paintings, but in my case there's one painting that immediately captures my attention, and that's Eckersberg's painting of the woman For me, this is a very unique painting. It's a precious thing to be able to paint such a small painting and at the same time express so much. And then it's unique in all its simplicity, where many of the other paintings have many more messages. I think that's the fantastic thing about this painting. It hangs over in a corner, so you have to be sort of looking for it to find it. What is interesting, I think, is that it is a woman. At that time it was almost always men who were portrayed, whereas this is one of the first paintings of this kind, and especially without clothes, partly. In the mirror, too, you can see the top part of the breasts, but not the whole bosom. It's sort of very discreetly suggested, but this way you actually get more things in this painting, although in reality it's just a figure. I think it's very interesting that there's a mirror in this painting. You get two people in the painting, which in reality only shows one, but you get the reflection of the woman from the front by looking in the mirror. It's a fantastic gimmick he's onto there. Her ear is extremely red and very, very large, compared with the way a woman's ear perhaps should be. Sort of graceful, you could say, the body and the whole way the figure is standing is very beautiful and fantastic. And you can see the interesting thing if you look really hard, that an earring is missing that should be hanging over here. So it isn't quite accurately painted, but that isn't the most important thing either. The most important thing is the form and the color scheme. What is fantastic about this painting is that it's so small, and yet it expresses just as much as a large painting of the same figure.