The murals on the exterior of the museum were designed in 1847-8 and executed in 1850 by Jørgen Sonne in a sort of coloured plaster intarsia with heavy black outlines. Developing a happy idea of Bindesbøll’s, these tell rather realistically the story of the transport of the sculpture from Rome to Copenhagen. The foliate work on the court walls was carried out by H. C. From in 1844—laurel-trees, oaks, and palms. In the interiors, where Thorwaldsen disposed his own sculptures somewhat less formally than he had the Aegina sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, the intricate and brightly coloured decoration of the barrel vaults is in that Pompeian mode which had been a part of the Romantic Classical tradition ever since the time of Clérisseau and Adam. This provides a happy contrast to so much Neo-Classic white marble statuary set against plain walls painted in strong flat colours. The finest of these ceilings have no modern rivals, even in Adam’s eighteenth-century work, for the precise geometrical organization of the panels and the delicate refinement of the very low plaster reliefs. Bolder and wholly abstract are the floors of tile mosaic arranged in a bewildering variety of patterns, some imitated from Roman models but more of them so original in design that they suggest ‘hardedge’ paintings of the 1960s.
In his few other executed works and projects Bindesbøll showed himself considerably less Classical and Schinkelesque than in this museum; perhaps the museum reflects Thorvaldsen’s taste as much or more than his own. Tending, like other Danes of his generation, towards the Rundbogenstil in his urban buildings, for his country houses he arrived at a very direct and logical rural mode in which rustic materials and asymmetrical compositions were controlled by a Romantic Classical sense of order and decorum. If, on the one hand, his interest in bold structural polychromy in the fifties parallels that of the English Butterfield, his domestic mode forecasts that of the English Webb (see Chapters [10] and [12]). Bindesbøll’s production was small indeed, but at least the very simple Rundbogenstil Agricultural School of 1856-8 at 13 Bulowsvej in Copenhagen, executed after his death, deserves specific mention here.
J. D. Herholdt (1818-1902), living almost half a century longer than Bindesbøll, was naturally more productive. He was also a master of the Rundbogenstil hardly rivalled in his generation even by the ablest Germans. Late as is his National Bank at 17 Holmens Kanal in Copenhagen—1866-70—this is one of the finest examples anywhere of the more Tuscan sort of Rundbogenstil. His University Library of 1857-61 in the Frue Plads is less suave in design but much more original in its brick detailing. As late as the eighties he maintained the Romantic Classical discipline in his Italian Gothic Raadhus at Odense of 1880-3 as well as carrying out many tactful restorations of Romanesque churches. Of his fine Copenhagen Station of 1863-4 the wooden shed now serves on another site as a sports hall.
G. F. Hetsch (1830-1903) also continued the Romantic Classical line, most happily perhaps in his Sankt Ansgarskirke of 1841-2, the Roman Catholic church in the Bredgade in Copenhagen. Ferdinand Meldahl (1827-1908), although capable of very disciplined Early Renaissance design in his office building at 23 Havnegade in Copenhagen of 1864, led Danish architecture away from Romantic Classicism and the Rundbogenstil towards a rather Second Empire sort of eclecticism after he became professor at the Copenhagen Academy in 1864 and its director in 1873 (see Chapter [8]).
With its great individual monuments by C. F. Hansen and Bindesbøll and its streets of fine houses in the Romantic Classical vernacular, Copenhagen provides today a more attractive picture of the production of this period than almost any other city. Norway, at this time less prosperous than Denmark, has work by Schinkel himself. At least the designs for the buildings of the University at Christiania, erected in 1841-51 by C. H. Grosch (1801-65), a pupil of C. F. Hansen and of Hetsch, were revised by Schinkel just before his death, and the handling of the walls is certainly quite characteristic of his work in the clarity and logic of their articulation.
In Sweden, where the dominant influences in the early nineteenth century were first French and then German as in Denmark, there was no comparably brilliant development of Romantic Classicism. Rosendal, a country house built in 1823-5 by Fredrik Blom (1781-1851), is a pleasant and very discreet edifice that might well be by almost any French architect of Blom’s generation. His Skeppsholm Church in Stockholm of 1824-42, circular within and octagonal without, is a typical but not especially distinguished work of its period. More characteristic are the modest wooden houses with Grecian detail. These are similar to, but in their naive ‘correctness’ less extreme than, the temple houses of Russia and the United States. Their board-and-batten walls might, paradoxically, have inspired one aspect of Downing’s anti-Grecian campaign in America in the forties (see Chapter [15]).
In 1850 Stüler was called to Stockholm from Berlin to design the National Museum. Eventually completed in 1865, this is in a richer Venetian Renaissance mode than he usually employed at home. Such more definitely Romantic modes were generally exploited by native architects only much later. For example, the Sodra Theatre of 1858-9 in Stockholm by J. F. Åbom (1817-1900) is still quite a restrained example of the revived High Renaissance; while so excellent a specimen of the more Tuscan sort of Rundbogenstil as the Skandias Building in Stockholm by P. M. R. Isaeus (1841-90) and C. Sundahl dates from 1886-9, but must be compared with German work of at least a generation earlier.
Holland has even less of distinction to offer in this period than Sweden.[[60]] Yet the Lutheran Round Church on the Singel in Amsterdam, as it was rebuilt after a fire in 1826 by Jan de Greef (1784-1834) and T. F. Suys (1783-1861), a pupil of Percier, lends a distinctly Venetian air to the local scene with its great dome, despite the admirably Dutch quality of its fine brickwork. The original church was built in 1668-77 by Adriaen Dortsmann, and doubtless the peculiar plan, with main entrance under the pulpit and double galleries at the rear outside the main rotunda, derives from the older building.
The monumentally Classical Haarlemer Poort of 1840 in Amsterdam by J. D. Zocher (1790-1870) may also be mentioned, as it is nearly unique in Holland. This has the stuccoed walls that, in Holland as elsewhere, generally replaced exposed brickwork under the influence of international Romantic Classicism. The Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, built by Z. Reijers in 1839 and demolished in 1933, dominated by an Ionic portico of stone, might well have risen in any French provincial city of the day. Very similar, except that the portico is Corinthian, is the Palace of Justice in Leeuwarden built in 1846-52 by T. A. Romein (1811-81). Handsome also, but like the Hague Academy less autochthonous in character than the Round Church, is the long stone façade beside the Rokin of the Nederlandsche Bank in the Turfmarkt (1860) by Willem Anthony Froger. On the whole, Holland is the exception that proves the rule. Almost alone in Northern Europe Dutch architects failed, in general, to accept Romantic Classicism as it was adumbrated most notably in the treatise of Durand; while local conditions, in any case, reduced monumental architectural production to a minimum in the decades between Waterloo and the mid century.