Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg is usually called the father of Danish painting, and the title is close to literal. As a young man he studied in Paris under Jacques-Louis David, then spent years in Rome, and came home to Copenhagen in 1816 to teach at the Academy just as Denmark was entering a remarkable burst of painting now known as its Golden Age. Almost every important Danish artist of the next generation passed through his studio.

What he taught them was to look. He drilled his pupils in perspective with near-mathematical strictness, sent them outdoors to paint directly from nature, and set up careful studies of the model and of ships. His own pictures have a clear, sober precision, exact portraits, views of Rome and Copenhagen, and above all marine paintings, the light and rigging of sailing vessels recorded with a sailor's attention.

He remained at the Academy for decades and even served as its director. He fathered a large family across three marriages, and he died in Copenhagen in 1853 during a cholera epidemic that swept the city that summer, one of the thousands it killed.