The story
On the upper floors of Frederiksborg, a Renaissance castle built across three small islands in a lake at Hillerød, Danish history is told mostly through faces. Kings and queens, generals, scientists and writers hang in room after room, arranged roughly by period, so that a walk through the building becomes a walk through some 500 years of Danish life.
The castle was built for King Christian IV in the early 1600s, in red brick and sandstone. On the night of 16 December 1859 a fire, lit in a room whose chimney was under repair, destroyed most of it. The chapel survived, and more than 300 paintings were carried out. The brewer J.C. Jacobsen, founder of Carlsberg, then offered to pay for the restoration and for a museum of national history inside the walls. It was founded in 1878 and is still a department of the Carlsberg Foundation.
Two large group portraits show what the collection does best. Constantin Hansen, a painter of the Danish Golden Age, spent the early 1860s on The Danish Constituent Assembly, the gathering of 1848 and 1849 that gave the country its first democratic constitution. Some 40 years later Peder Severin Krøyer painted Men of Industry, 53 engineers and industrialists at an imagined meeting in a Copenhagen power station.
Smaller finds turn up too, such as a crayon portrait of the young Danish poet Helge Rode, drawn by Edvard Munch in 1891. The chapel, where Danish kings were anointed for nearly two centuries, still keeps its organ from 1610.
