Christen Kobke

Danish Master of Light

Jackson David

Christen Kobke (1819-1848) was arguably the greatest painter of Denmark's "Golden Age", the period of the nation's supreme artistic achievement. He had the remarkable ability to invest the simplest corner of town or countryside with charm and delicacy, without resorting to the artificial rhetoric of academic traditions. He enowed ordinary people and places, and simple motifs, with a universal significance. This book gives an overview of Kobke's achievement within its cultural context, and also highlights the most innovative aspects of his work, including outdoor sketching, his fascination with painterly immediacy in the treatment of light and atmosphere, his exquisite originality and his experimental outlook. This book accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, from 17 March to 13 June 2010. It then travels to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, from 5 July to 3 October 2010.

About the Author

David Jackson is Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at Leeds University. He specialises in Russian and Scandinavian art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has curated exhibitions such as Russian Landscape (2004, at the Groninger Museum, Holland, and the National Gallery, London) and a major retrospective of Akseli Gallen-Kallela (2006, also at the Groninger Museum). He is the author of "The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Russian Painting" and "Ilya Repin. The Russian Vision".

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