ABILDGAARD, Nicolai - b. 1743 København, d. 1809 Frederiksdal - WGA

ABILDGAARD, Nicolai

(b. 1743 København, d. 1809 Frederiksdal)

Danish painter. He first studied at the Copenhagen Academy before moving to Rome in 1772. In the company of Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and painter John Henry Fuseli he began to move away from the classicism he learned at the Academy. He developed an appreciation for the literature of Shakespeare, Homer and Ossian, legendary Gaelic poet. He worked with themes from Greek, as well as Norse mythology which placed him at the forefront of Nordic romanticism.

Five years later, Abildgaard returned to Denmark and began painting in a classical style, demonstrated by his works depicting the Roman authors Terence and Apuleius. From 1789 to 1791, Abildgaard served as the director of the Copenhagen Academy. He also worked occasionally as a sculptor, architect and designer.

Adam and Eve

This engraving is an illustration from Johannes Ewalds “Adam and Eve”.

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Culmin's Ghost Appears to his Mother

The subject is taken from the Songs of Ossian.

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Simo and his Former Slave Sosia

The painting depicts a scene from the ancient writer Terence’s romantic comedy Andria. It is one of the four large canvases with scenes from the comedy Abildgaard created after 1800 to be placed in his residence provided at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Charlottenborg.

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The Midwife Taking Leave of the Girl from Andros

The painting is the first of the four scenes.

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The Wounded Philoctetes

From 1772 Abildgaard spent five years in Rome thanks to a scholarship granted by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. It was while in Rome that he created this depiction of the legendary hero Philoctetes, whose screams of pain caused by a festering snakebite made his comrades-in-arms abandon him on a Greek island during the Trojan war.

Abildgaard used a principal work of classical sculpture as the basis for his rendition of Philoctetes’ tormented state: the Torso Belvedere in the Vatican museum served as the model for the plastic and mannered rendition of the hero’s upper body. With this move, Abildgaard’s stylistic innovation was imbued with features of a work canonised by neoclassicism - without, however, reducing the tensions in the painting.

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