View from the Battery toward the City (1836): Art, History and Details

View from the Battery toward the City (1836) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the 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.

Object facts

• Title: View from the Battery toward the City
• Date: 1836
• Creator attribution: Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (Danish, 1783–1853)
• Culture: Denmark
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: graphite, pen and black and gray ink, and brush and gray wash on wove paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 18.5 x 31.5 cm (7 5/16 x 12 3/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - Misc. Countries
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2020.225

A detail from the museum

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg depicted the view seen in this work, of Copenhagen from the small island of Trekroner, in several other works including a painting in Denmark’s Hirschsprung Collection.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Conisbee, Philip, Kasper Monrad, and Lene Bøgh Rønberg. Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, 1783-1853. Exh. Cat. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2003.
• C.W. Eckersbergs dagbøger 1870-1837. Vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk, 2009).
• Dauschek, Anja. Regine Gerhardt, and Vanessa Hirsch. Melbye: Maler des Meeres, Painter of the Ocean. Exh. Cat. Hamburg: Altonaer Museum, 2017.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.