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Carl Frederik Sørensen
Mediterranean Sea, Cassis, Oil on Canvas. Painted 1864 En Plein Air

1864

About the Item

A wonderful small sunset "en plein air" painting by Danish artist Carl Frederik Sörensen (Sørensen, Soerenson, Sorensen, (1818-1879)). The motif is taken from Cassis in South of France and depicts a sunset seen from the Mediterranean sea with a sailing boat and the sun setting behind the mountains near Cassis in the background. Oil on canvas laid on cardboard, signed Cassis and with monogram CFS and dated 21 Juni 1864. The painting, despite its smallness, has an extraordinary intensity and power with depth in all its colors. It looks even better in real life. It has some resemblance in style of the famous contemporary Norwegian artist Peder Balke´s small paintings. Sorensen was a Danish marine painter. He was the son of merchant and skipper Rasmus and Else Margrethe Sørensen The father owned a yacht, which he sailed himself, and Sørensen was already allowed to sail with him as an eight-year-old boy, sometimes as far as Norway; this gave him a taste for the sailor's life, but his mother wanted him to stay on land, and when she became a widow, she sent the 11-year-old boy to Copenhagen. After a few years in school Sorensen had already shown an ability to draw and paint and was put into painting lessons. At the same time he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and used all his spare time to carry out studies according to nature. The oldest preserved picture of him is a coastal part from Taarbæk (around 1836); it has interest in the evidence it bears of a distinct sense of color and a fresh and independent perception of nature. After becoming an apprentice, he continued to draw at the Academy and progressed rapidly. His first exhibited painting, A winter landscape, motif at Skovshoved (1843), was, however, a rather immature work. The works that appeared the following year were already more secure and independent, two marines and a richly decorated tiled stove screen, which is why he received the smaller silver medal. He found a connoisseur and a buyer in the postmaster general, Count Sophus Danneskiold-Samsøe, and occasionally he also sold small pictures to others, but he did not dare to give up decorative painting for the time being, and he thus participated in the decoration of the interior of Thorvaldsen's Museum. When he finished his work there, Count Danneskiold got him a studio at the post office, and here he painted for a dozen years, until he had come to the point where he could build himself a house. As the years went by, Sørensen won the public's favor, but he only got the funds to undertake a major sea voyage when King Christian VIII in 1846 allowed him to accompany a naval frigate to the Mediterranean. From this trip, as from all his following ones, Sørensen brought home a quantity of studies, but only a small part of these he later used in his pictures, although he has, however, several times taken his subjects from foreign, especially English, Scottish and Dutch, waters. It was the waters of his home country that he felt most strongly attracted to, and it was also the treatment of a Danish subject that brought him the first more significant recognition from the Academy of Fine Arts, the Neuhausen Prize, which was awarded to him in 1847 for Ships in the Kattegat under windy conditions with swells after a storm. In 1842, he took the initiative to found the Artists' Association with some other artist friends. After that time, Sørensen was one of our most respected and popular artists. In 1856 he became a member of the Danish, in 1866 of the Swedish Art Academy and then he became a titular professor in 1869 and a Knight of the Dannebrog in 1874. Four of his most important paintings belong to the Statens Museum for Kunst (Denmarks National Museum) Many of his works went to Norway and Sweden, thus to Stockholm's National Museum, others to America. His production ability seemed to grow over the years; he was not only a tireless but also a very fast worker. In winter he was almost always in his studio as long as the sun was in the sky; he spent part of the summer on larger and smaller journeys, sometimes in his own country, sometimes in foreign waters. In 1853-54 he was abroad with the support of the Academy; 10 years later he went to south of Europe again, this time with the artist Michael Ancher. Even in Sørensen's earliest works, there is, an independence, especially in the perception of color and style, which does not remind of school or role models. Before he had ever seen a recent foreign painting, his eye for painting was developed to follow in the sunlit sea surface an infinity of color transitions, his artistic instinct was sure enough to get them off the palette and onto the canvas.
  • Creator:
    Carl Frederik Sørensen (1818-1879, Danish)
  • Creation Year:
    1864
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 6.11 in (15.5 cm)Width: 10.04 in (25.5 cm)Depth: 0.6 in (1.5 cm)
  • Medium:
    Canvas,Cardboard,Oil
  • Movement & Style:
    Land
  • Period:
    1860-1869
  • Condition:
    In very nice good condition. Surface recently cleaned and frame is recent. Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard.
  • Gallery Location:
    Stockholm, SE
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU2608214382002
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