Old woman supplicating alms.
Man playing flute.
Marks.—A.H. incised on base, and A.H. painted in blue at side of base. Height 6-3/8 inches.
(At the Dansk Folke Museum, Copenhagen.)
The groups of Lovers with Cupids and chains of roses are two examples of this romantic movement which came into the world of ceramics, a reflex of the decorative art of fashionable Court painters, who invented a topsy-turvy world of make-believe.
The quiet strength and the subdued restraint of the old Copenhagen figures stand out in contrast to this outburst of fanciful exuberance. The note of fidelity is as apparent in the figures in costume of the Müller period as it is noticeable in regard to floral decorations and modelled foliage taken direct from nature. Nor does this betray a want of imagination or a lack of ideality in choice of figure subjects. If it be classic, there is poetry in the statuette of A Hero, or a loose rein is given by the modeller to his Sea Horses, a poet's vision of the sea rollers leaping shore-wards from the Baltic. The fashion for the romantic did eventually tinge the Copenhagen atelier. Some of the little figures are graceful, retiring, modest examples of the movement. It is true they are decked in impossible costumes, but the mode has in the transplantation acquired simplicity and reticence. Some of them suggest, in porcelain, the quaint charm of Kate Greenaway's world of picturesque children.
Of the gallery of contemporary life the Copenhagen figures, in the main, are faithful likenesses. The dancing cavalier and lady (see [Frontispiece]) represent persons who actually did dance as they are modelled. There is nothing added except that touch of the modeller's genius in catching the rhythmical pose of the poetry of motion which crystallizes them as a work of art. The Flute Player is equally caught in the act, natural and unobtrusive. There is nothing affected in his attitude or in his costume (illustrated, p. [127]). It is such traits as these which endear the old Copenhagen figures to connoisseurs. The glaze is rich and liquid and the colours are subdued in tone and appeal to lovers of subtlety in art. Whatever extraneous influences in art press upon the work of the Danish potters, there is a process of refining which they seemingly undergo, and in so doing
Suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
As may be imagined, these old-world figures are much treasured by Danish collectors, who realize that they represent a national phase of art and form a record of quaint and forgotten costume. The sellers in the market-place, the women with fowls, the fisherman with the striped jersey and shiny hat familiar in old prints of our own sailormen, and the Admiral with his speaking trumpet—it might be the great Fischer himself, of the days when fleets were sweeping the North Sea and the Baltic—come with peculiar associations from bygone days.
