The story
Just north of Copenhagen, in a country house set in its own park, hangs a collection of French painting good enough to have startled Paris. Wilhelm Hansen, a Danish insurance magnate, bought fast and well during the First World War, and by 1918 his Impressionists and their forerunners were reckoned the finest such group anywhere outside France, with Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Gauguin and a room's worth of Corot.
Hansen built the house, Ordrupgaard, in 1918 and left the whole estate to the Danish state, which opened it as a museum after his widow died. Beside the French rooms it holds a deep collection of the Danish Golden Age, the early 19th-century painters who fixed the clear northern light of their own country.
In 2005 the museum gained a curving black extension by the architect Zaha Hadid, and the modernist home of the designer Finn Juhl nearby is shown on the same ticket.
