Christen Købke is now regarded as the greatest Danish artist to emerge from the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts. He brought a clarity and luminosity to the naturalism he had learned from C. W. Eckersberg (1783–1853), who had studied in Paris with Jacques-Louis David. During his brief career, Købke concentrated on landscape painting and portraiture. This near-lifesize work of about 1838 is larger than most of Købke's other portraits, and remarkable for its psychological intensity and sharply observed realism.

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