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

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2004 by Donald Bruce

After the works by Degas, Helge Jacobsen's collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists ('frightful, affected and deplorable', according to his father Carl) is mostly daunting. The exceptions are Monet's evocation of dusk on the River Zaan as it seeps towards Amsterdam and the Ijsselmeer through reeds and the shadows of masted and rowing boats under a mill; and one of Cezanne's several self-portraits, usually sombre-faced but here almost cheerful as he heads through a snowstorm, with a backward glance, in a bowler hat. Helge Jacobsen entered the art market when the prime works of the period 1870-90 were either sold, or being resold at prices too high for him; leaving him with a secondary collection which includes one of Sisley's pale records of floods on the Seine, and two of Maillol's sculptural decorations which have not been relegated to the Tuileries Garden; also a sequence which traces Gauguin, in his feeblest works, from Paris, through Copenhagen and Brittany to the comatose maidens of Tahiti.

Apart from nineteenth-century painting and sculpture, the Carlsberg Glyptotek contains works ranging from a limestone hippopotamus, from 3,000 B.C., to a marble sarcophagus of A.D. 300. (The Egyptian hippopotamus is matched, three millennia later, by a Roman version in red marble.) The building itself, now under reconstruction, opened in 1897. It adjoins the delectable acres of Tivoli Pleasure Gardens, founded in 1813, where in the summer one may dine at one of several tiny oil-lamplit open-air restaurants. For the price of admission to the gardens one may hear a symphony concert, attend the Italian Pantomime (or Commedia del' Arte) and stroll around the staid old-fashioned funfair. Their diversity, but harmony of enjoyment and cultural enrichment, are echoed in the nearby Glyptotek.

Ancient Art to Post-Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, until 10 December from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, with an extension until 10 p.m. on Fridays. Admission costs [pounds sterling]9, with various concessions. For further information: tel. 020 7300 5615 or go to website www.royalacademy.org.uk