The art of Copenhagen equally reflects the national life and character under a northern sky. Pensive, dreamy, tinged with the stillness of the Arctic night, with its violet sky, the wistful art of the North never attempts the sensuous moments of the art of the Far East. The beauty of form is reticent and reposeful. The range of the grand-feu colours coincides exactly with the tender colours of the little kingdom, and the melting glaze adds that luminosity which makes the Danish landscape so spirituelle.
Danish art has never attempted to be Japanese; on the other hand, Japan has seriously realized that the art of Copenhagen is worth the copying, and has done this with a light heart.
Again and again one is struck with the originality of a design new to ceramic decoration. The Placque, of the period 1896 to 1900 (illustrated, p. [207]), is a case in point, and is almost the only instance of a dallying with the romantically artificial. But the effect is so charming and so poetical that it disarms criticism. What could promise so little as a subject for decorative treatment? A pair of iron gates, flanked with stone pillars surmounted by formal urns. An avenue of poplars approached by the ascending steps of a terrace, stretching from the foreground in two converging lines, with the solitary figure of a woman in black in the middle distance. That is all. But the result is an alluring picture of an old-world chateau. A touch of Southern elegance and courtly grace makes itself evident in the formal scene, with its pathos of the figure symbolizing lonely sorrow and the dark shadow of the chapel at the end of the grove.
It is possible, without eliminating much, to trace the steady growth of temperamental art during a quarter of a century in successive stages of five years. True to first impelling motives, the art of the factory has never turned back. The modern movement known as l'art nouveau, which swept across Europe with its meaningless swirls and curves, left no trace on the work of the Royal Copenhagen Factory. Rich in the possession and eager in the fulfilment of its own original conceptions, it had no need of extraneous impulses, and has remained unstirred by ephemeral art movements. The illustrations in this chapter are arranged chronologically as far as possible, and it will be seen that the subjects become as Danish as the ballad of King Christian. The gallery is rich in its dreamy suggestiveness, the ceramic record of reposeful scenes luxuriating in luscious somnolence—the sea, the sand-dunes, the wild swans, and geese, and mallards, the wood with its deer and wild life, the secluded lake with its denizens, the meadows, and the cattle of the farm lands.
DESSERT PLATE.
With perforated border and rim decorated with scale design in blue, and having national Danish pattern in centre.
There has been a process of fermentation going on in modern Danish pictorial art, and its influence is seen on the porcelain produced at the royal factory. It is new because it is everlastingly old—the worship of Nature. There is in modern Copenhagen porcelain the tender, dreamy melancholy of the old Danish ballads. It is like some magic story told in the twilight. Everything is silent, nebulous, steeped in fragrant yet pathetic memories. There is a subtle and refined introspection, an æsthetic yearning akin to sadness.
Every Dane remembers Jacobsen's whimsical visionary Mogens, who hums softly to himself the refrain—"I Längsel, I Längsel jeg lever!" (Longing, longing I live!).