The story
In 1881 Peder Severin Krøyer, then a young painter and a friend of the household, painted the family of Heinrich Hirschsprung, a Copenhagen tobacco manufacturer. That family portrait now hangs in the museum their collection became. Hirschsprung had begun buying Danish art in 1865, and in 1902 he gave the collection to the Danish state.
He died in 1908 and never saw the result. The museum opened in 1911 in a neoclassical building by the architect Hermann Baagøe Storck, in the Østre Anlæg park on the line of Copenhagen's old ramparts, a short walk from the National Gallery of Denmark. It shows Danish painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries in a sequence of small rooms.
The Golden Age is here through Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the professor who trained much of that generation, with his small nude of a woman doing her hair before a mirror, painted in 1841. The Skagen painters, the artists' colony at the northern tip of Jutland, have a strong presence too. Michael Ancher is represented by a portrait of his wife, the painter Anna Ancher, from 1884, and Krøyer returns with Summer Evening at Skagen Beach from 1899, showing himself and his wife Marie walking along the shore at dusk.
