The World's Columbian Exposition 1893. Chicago, U.S.A. 1893
Official Catalogue With Illustrations issued by the Royal Danish Commission

 94 DENMARK quently and most perfectly depicted Italy in the whole of its splendor as people then scanted to see and did see it. His various natural gifts combined the sense of noble and festive beauty with a brilliant, often frolic- some humor, and gave him a marvellous creative power, an inexhaustible spring of artistic ideas. He has treated the most varied subjects with the same pithy: the variagated tumult of Italian popular life, the quiet scenes of plain domestic life of Copenhagen, solemn subjects from the Bible, comical figures from the plays of the Danish classic, Holberg, pathetic scenes from Danish history, or the adventures of Don Quixote. Capital as his pictures are with their pompously festive and dramatical compositions, warm heart and witty head speaking in their favor alter- nately or simultaneously, one often feels as if his genius had been prevented from spreading out its wings freely by the somewhat narrow- minded claims to pictural construction that the country or the times put upon a man who was a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Copenhagen, and its director. A yet fresher and pleasanter impression of the power of his genius may be had from his admirable sketches and his thousands and thousands of drawings in which his exuberant and never weary imagination has fixed whatever appealed to it from the most beautiful images to the boldest caricatures. As compared with the lively pictures by Ernst Meyer and Mar- strand the representations of Italian popular life painted by Constantin Hansen (1804—1880) seem rather dry in all their solidity. But his thorough absorption in the art of the antique was of the greatest con- sequence to his estimable main work: the decorating of the vestibule of the University of Copenhagen with frescos on antique subjects. Moreover he dared to engage on those subjects that had been indicated by Høyen to be the aim of national art: the representation of Old Northern mythology; his imagination, however, was too tame and his style too sober to make his paintings in that sphere equally valuable. The artist who has given us the liveliest and most imaginative illustrations