Danish (?), Portrait of a boy. Oil on canvas,... Lot 45

Danish (?), Portrait of a boy. Oil on canvas, doubled. 1828. 41,9 x 37,1 cm. Monogrammed in ligature to the right of the sitter and dated "ÆR:/1828 p.". Framed. //rg/49,5/4 Seriously the boy looks into a world that still lies ahead of him. Standing at the transition from child to adolescent, he looks almost head-on at the viewer with alert eyes - the slight axial shift between head and torso is barely noticeable. The boy is dressed in a dark blue jacket with golden buttons, which - also due to color changes in the last two centuries - stands out only slightly from the dark background. From the unbuttoned jacket "pours out", as it were, a broad white shirt collar, which has settled on his shoulders and makes his head look as if it were on a white cloud. The white of the collar dominates the image, emerging from the darkness and radiating onto the boy's head, which becomes tangible in the light in a way that is not without suggestion. One may also recognize in the white collar, in the Christian sense, a reference to the innocence and purity of the boy - white is the color of the Virgin Mary -, but above all it is he who gives a gentle dynamism to the austere structure of the painting, together with the unpretentious hairstyle puts the head in a light movement. If you look at him longer, you will also notice slight irregularities in the actually even face, which reinforce this impression: The left eye is a little smaller and is arched over by the fuzz of the barely visible eyebrow, while the right wing of the nose is shifted slightly downward, as is the mouth on the right. These small deviations from frontality give the head inner tension, slight excitement and cause the suggestive look that still touches the viewer today. Who is the boy? The painting does not give any information about this, so that an identification of the boy will not be possible, but he probably belongs to those bourgeois strata for whom the beginning of the 19th century meant a social awakening that also included pictorial representation. Just as little as the identity of the boy can be elucidated, the painter of the painting also remains hidden, which is regrettable, since it is an extremely high-quality portrait. The portrait is laid out in the traditional form of the bust, which leaves space on the right of the shoulder for the ligatured monogram "AE R/ 1828 p[inxit]". It has not yet been possible to connect this monogram with a name, but the immediacy of the gaze with which the boy faces the viewer possibly suggests a Nordic, perhaps Scandinavian artist. There, for example, in Hamburg Philipp Otto Runge, along with Caspar David Friedrich the inventor of Romanticism, had created at the beginning of the century with his "Hülsenbecksche Kinder" (Hamburger Kunsthalle, Inv. No. HK 1012) a new image of the child, which responds to the representation of the adult on an equal footing. Our painter, who renounces all childlike posturing, and the boy, whom we can watch becoming conscious, discovering the world, have both accomplished this change of consciousness. Provenance: privately owned for decades, Southern Germany. Taxation: Differential taxation (VAT: Margin Scheme).