Un groupe d'artistes danois à Rome

In the 1830s young Danish artists went to Rome the way earlier generations had, to study and to escape home, and Constantin Hansen painted seven of them crammed into a rented room there in 1837. They sit on the floor in shirtsleeves against the heat, smoking long Turkish pipes, the door open onto a Roman rooftop. The one leaning back on the threshold and talking is the architect Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll, just returned from Greece and telling the others what he had seen. Hansen put himself in the group too, at the left. These were friends who ate and argued together far from Copenhagen, and the picture is his record of that circle. He built it not from a single sitting but from separate studies of each man’s face.