Art from Copenhagen: two brewers' legacy at the Royal Academy

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2004 by Donald Bruce

'WE are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice', proclaimed Dr Johnson when, as executor of Henry Thrale's will, he promoted the sale of his late friend's Southwark Brewhouse to Barclay, Perkins and Company. In successful brewing the outlay is small and the profits are great, yet for all their wealth few brewers have been as philanthropic as the Jacobsens, founders of the Carlsberg Company in Copenhagen. Part of the art-collection they handed on to the Danish public is now on display at the Royal Academy, under the loquacious title of Ancient Art to Post-Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Indeed, a few of the works are masterpieces.

The grandfather, Jacob Christian Jacobsen (1811-1887), amassed sculptures by his contemporary and compatriot Bertel Thorwaldsen, a Neo-Classicist akin to John Flaxman in Attic dexterity, but lacking Flaxman's sharpness and tightness of design. It is a pity that there are no figures by Thorwaldsen in the present exhibition. Perhaps they all made their way to Thorwaldsen's designated museum in Copenhagen.

The father, Carl Jacobsen (1842-1914), inherited a love of statuary, which is why the gallery he built alongside the enchanting Tivoli Pleasure Gardens is called the Glyptotek, or Museum of Sculpture. As a patriot he began his collection with Danish statues and the academic French works which had inspired them. He placed his statues in a Winter Garden, in the hope that the botanically-minded Danish people would come to look at the tropical palms and then rest their eyes on the works of art. As one enters the exhibition through a small conservatory which alludes to the Winter Garden, one is faced with Antonin Mercie's Glory to the Vanquished, an effigy of a muscular hero, with a broken sword and a fallen twig of laurel from his wreath, in the arms of an angel. The anatomy is as sound as the thought is banal. Nearby stands Carl Jacobsen's first purchase, Eugene Delaplanche's Music, a nymph with a snatch of clothing and a marble violin strung with wire.

Reserved for a later room are Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's incessantly smiling busts and small pieces by Rodin at his appalling second-best. Both Carl Jacobsen and his son Helge (1882-1946) ignored their prodigiously imaginative Swedish contemporary Carl Milles, little known outside Scandinavia but quite likely to be regarded, in times to come, as the most brilliant sculptor of the twentieth century. That may be because Swedes are not customarily much esteemed by their Danish neighbours.

Beyond the palm-court foyer one finds a gallery of canvases from the self-styled Danish Golden Age of Painting. Most of these Danish pictures are traditional in subject: life-studies of heavy young women and, with plenty of cedar trees, views of the Campagna, the Bay of Naples and the Roman Forum. The more accomplished works are portrayals of the modest Danish homeland, such as Martinus Rorbye's study of the narrow church tower at Vester Egede as it darts out of its weedy flatlands, and Christen Kobke's more distant vista of Frederiksborg Castle in late autumn, as its spires dim in the spreading dark and birds settle in the waning trees.

The Danish gallery is flanked on both sides by the souvenirs of Carl Jacobsen's last passion, Antiquities, in the emulous quest of which he almost exhausted his private fortune. On one side is part of his Egyptian assemblage, formed with the help of Professor Flinders Petrie of the University of London. Awingly positioned and lit, the feldspar statue of the jackal-god Anubus, as suavely sinister as an avenger in a play by John Webster, keeps intent, slit-eyed watch over a tomb. A sleek statuette of a naked ephebe, with narrow limbs and a small convex belly, curiously anticipates, except in one small detail, Degas's nude study for an adolescent ballerina, six rooms and 4,000 years away. The curators have shown discretion in presenting only a few of Carl Jacobsen's thousand Egyptian artefacts: copiously monotonous. Many of Flinders Petrie's discoveries remain in packing cases. The British Museum has more mummy-cases than it knows what to do with. The close-packed Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim (the largest Egyptian Museum in Germany) is a deterrent rather than an incentive to an interest in Egyptology. Yet Carl Jacobsen never palled as he heaped one chipped hieroglyphic tablet on another.

A more rigorous selection of his diffused Etruscan and Roman relics in the other wing (many copied from better works, many in lamentable condition and some of dubious provenance) would have enhanced the exhibition, which should be of art, not history and archaeology. A few sculptures elicit a fleeting interest, mainly because of their subject: Pompeius with the expression of a perplexed lion; the sternly vicious Tiberius with his close-set eyes above a nose which is small but inwardly curved like a raptor's beak; a matron, past her youth and with a patrician hairstyle, wholly naked as Venus, in defiance of all Roman propriety. Portrayed towards the end of the first century A.D., she may represent one of the women of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, perhaps Messalina at the door of her lupinar. Also from the end of the first century comes the most winning and accomplished sculpture of the Roman section, which is nothing grander than a sow with her milk-white litter, perhaps in an allusion to the augury of the fecund sow which, in the Eighth Book of Virgil's Aeneid, encouraged Aeneas to settle the future Romans on the banks of the Tiber. With her snout raised she suckles her brood, protective and solicitous.