Stræben efter idealet

In a drawing by the Danish Golden Age artist Wilhelm Marstrand entitled 'The pursuit of the Ideal' a farmer drives his donkey forward by holding a lance of hay to its muzzle. Here the bait must be the ideal, and the aspirant with the ideal ambitions must be the donkey. The drawing is done with distinctive, wide, dark lines and hastily applied hatching. It clearly lacks finish and is therefore not a finished work in the classical sense. But Marstrand's drawing also suggests the process that drawings in the Golden Age usually took part in. In the first part of the 19th century, drawings and sketches served only as a preliminary to a finished painting. Danish visual artists considered a drawing first and foremost a step towards the end goal, namely the artist's ideal vision translated into a painting. In Striving for the Ideal, The drawing of the Golden Age receives separate attention for the first time. In order to understand drawing as an artistic medium in the Golden Age, Thomas Lederballe, senior researcher at the Kobberstiksamlingen at the Statens Museum for Art, analyzes the production of five important Danish artists: C.W. Eckersberg, Christen Købke, Wilhelm Bendz, Wilhelm Mars