Portrait of the Copperplate Engraver Carl Edvard Sonne

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Artist: Ditlev Blunck (Danish, 1798–1854)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 69.5 × 56 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

In paintings such as this, Ditlev Blunck together with Wilhelm Bendz developed the type of the genre painting of the time portraying the artist at work in his studio. Typical of this type of motif was the fact that in addition to portraying everyday situations in the studio, in the Romantic spirit of the time it also thematised the essence of art and the artist’s prerequisites. So it is of particular interest that it is a Dutch genre motif, Gerard ter Borch’s Seated girl in Peasant Costume (c. 1650), that is seen in what is to be assumed is a trial print hanging by the engraver’s work table.

The other pictures behind Sonne are prints after Blunck’s teacher C.A. Lorentzen and the former professor from the Academy, N.A. Abildgaard. Blunck has thus introduced the Dutch model on an equal footing with his own teachers. With this, the picture gives an impression of the kinds of motif that were reproduced in the Denmark of the Golden Age. But if it is read as an artistic manifesto, it shows which masters formed the background to the oeuvres of Blunck and his colleagues. Blunck was one of the earliest genre painters of the Danish Golden Age. He derived inspiration both from Eckersberg and from the more idealised German art.