It is with great pleasure that ARoS announces a comprehensive exhibition of works from one of the great periods in the history of Danish art. GOLD – TREASURES FROM THE DANISH GOLDEN AGE is packed with paintings both familiar and unfamiliar from this period and aspires to put forward a new view of the Danish Golden Age. For several years it has been our wish to place ARoS' Golden Age collection in a broader context and to show the familiar works alongside other Danish masterpieces brought together both from Denmark and abroad. With the help of substantial loans from the National Gallery in London, private collections in America and Denmark, museums in Norway and Sweden and art museums from all over the country, ARoS has created a research-based exhibition consisting of almost 200 works. A large number of the works belonging to private collections have never been on display before.

THE EXHIBITION

GOLD – TREASURES FROM THE DANISH GOLDEN AGE shows how the Danish Golden Age artists found new ways with their works, broke with tradition and demonstrated both courage and curiosity in motif and technique. We perhaps know the masterpieces of the Golden Age in the shape of impressive landscapes, appealing middle-class portraits and unspoiled Italian sights from the artists’ travels abroad. But there are also other and less well known stories of the Golden Age that manifest themselves in the intersection between art, literature, science and politics. So visitors will not only be presented with a large number of the best known works from the Golden Age; the exhibition will also be showing a considerable number of less familiar, but certainly not less interesting works.

Extending over a series of galleries, the exhibition deals with such themes such as changes in society, the dawn of open air painting, the emergence of a new, modern view of things, art on paper, travel impressions and political landscape paintings.

THE GOLDEN AGE

The Danish Golden Age (1800-1850) was a time in Denmark during which society, people and not least art underwent a process of change. The middle class acquired power, democracy was introduced and absolutism came to an end. It was an age marked by wars and financial crises, but also by the development of new inventions that revolutionized society, inventions such as the steamship, the steam locomotive, the photography etc. The artists identified themselves with these changes, and through their close links with the politicians and scientists of the age they contributed to developing and renewing Denmark.

NEW KNOWLEDGE

With the exhibition GOLD – TREASURES FROM THE DANISH GOLDEN AGE ARoS seeks to challenge our existing view of the Golden Age by introducing visitors to a range of new and perhaps unexpected views of the Danish Golden Age. In relation to this wish and as an accompaniment to the exhibition, ARoS is publishing a 304-page splendidly illustrated and research-based catalogue in Danish and English with contributors from universities and museums, placing the Golden Age in new contexts in relation to the literary, technological and scientific trends of the time.

The historian Hans Vammen writes about Danish society in the Golden Age and the literary academic Dan Ringgaard focuses on Hans Christian Andersen and the Danish authors of the day. The science historian Helge Kragh throws light on Hans Christian Ørsted and science during the Golden Age, and Jette Baagøe, the director of the Danish Museum of Hunting and Forestry , writes about the genuine Danish forest. The art historian Karina Lykke Grand has written on the political currents in the Golden Age, about the travel sketches of the period and not least on the new visual culture which can be traced in the more oblique Golden Age pictures.  In addition to these contributions, the catalogue also contains a section more directly related to the exhibition, which in content and structure will reflect the movement through the exhibition and themes in it.