View from the Battery toward the City
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)
1836
- Medium
- graphite, pen and black and gray ink, and brush and gray wash on wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 18.5 x 31.5 cm (7 5/16 x 12 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Denmark
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg is known for initiating Danish painting’s Golden Age—a period of cultural efflorescence during the first half of the 19th century. Marine subjects were among the artist’s favorite, and the primary focus of his work beginning in the 1820s. Dating from this period, this drawing depicts Russian ships viewed from a fortress in Copenhagen’s harbor. In his journal, Eckersberg described making the trip to see the fleet with friends and waiting for the waters to become calm enough for sailing. To convey this experience, he juxtaposed precise perspective of the landscape with expressively rendered clouds.
