the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen opened on 1 May 1897

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Today is the anniversary of the opening of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek on 1 May 1897.

The gallery was built to house the art collection of Carl Jacobsen that included French and Danish paintings, sculpture and antique art.

Carl Christian Hillman Jacobsen, born in 1842, was the son of Jacob Christian Jacobsen who had founded the Carlsberg Brewery in 1847. Father and son seem to have had a less than easy relationship and in 1882 Carl Jacobsen opened his own brewery, the Ny Carlsberg brewery, on land adjacent to his fathers brewery.

Carl Jacbsen travelled widely - in part to look at brewing in other countries but also to buy art. His home was at the west end of his brewery, just outside the main gate. As the collection of art grew, he extended and remodelled the villa and in 1882 added a new Winter Garden and in that year opened his collection to the public for the first time.

By 1885 there were 19 galleries alongside the house with a separate and ornate entrance from the road. Fourteen of the galleries were designed by the architect Vilhelm Dahlerup and the last five galleries by the architect Hack Kampmann. Both architects designed major buildings for the brewery.

On 8 March 1888, Jacobsen donated his collection of art to the State and to the City of Copenhagen but with the condition that they provide a suitable building.

After the old gates of the city were dismantled in the 1850s, the defences, with bastions and outer water-filled ditches, had either been levelled or, on the north side of the city, they had formed the starting point for laying out new public parks with new galleries and new museums.

The last stages of the work were on the west side of the old city. The pleasure garden of Tivoli had been founded in 1843 and was then just beyond the defences. By the 1880s, plans were being drawn up to build a new city hall between Tivoli and the old hay market, that had been just inside the old west gate and, initially, Jacobsen hoped that the new gallery for his collection would be close to the new city hall but, in the end, he agreed that the gallery would be built on the site of a ravelin below Holcks Bastion and immediately south of Tivoli.

Visiting the Glyptotek now, with its prominent position on HC Andersens Boulevard, it is difficult to understand why Jacobsen had reservation but an early photograph of the building, taken in 1897 from the tower of a new fire station, shows the Glyptotek isolated and with a water-filled basin close by that was part of a timber yard extending out into the south harbour.

The first stage of the gallery was designed by Vilhelm Dahlerup with a grand entrance front and two wings to the back that framed an open courtyard. Jacobsen’s collection of Danish and French art from the 18th century was displayed in these new galleries.

Then, in January 1899, Jacobsen donated his collection of Antique art to the Glyptotek and the building was extended to the west with new galleries that were designed by Hack Kampmann and Vilhelm Dahlerup designed a Winter Garden in the courtyard that connected the two parts.

an introduction to the historic buildings of the Carlsberg Brewery April 2022

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

 

Holckenhus

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Holckenhus is a large and prominent apartment building on HC Andersens Boulevard that is two blocks south of the city hall and opposite Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

It occupies a complete city block that is not square but is actually a distinct trapezium with it's narrowest front to HC Andersens Boulevard; a long north front to the relatively narrow but busy Stormgade; a main frontage to Vester Voldgade and the most important and best-known frontage to the public space of Dantes Plads.

The building was designed by the architect Philip Smidth who also designed several of the major buildings around the city hall and it stands over the site of one of the major bastions of the old city defences called Holck's Bastion and that gave the building its name.

This part of the defences was the last major section around the city to be dismantled - late in the 1880s. Work on the the apartment building started in 1891 and was completed in 1893. Work on the Glyptotek began in 1892 and was completed in 1896 and there are early photographs that shows open ground beyond the gallery and the apartment buildings where the land there was being claimed from the sea.

The apartment building has upper floors in red brick with architectural features - including window architraves and quoins that form pilasters at the corners - in pale stone or cement and over a rusticated stone base but the most distinct feature is the steeply-pitched mansard roofs with dormer windows over what are marked out with quoins to be corner towers along with raised roofs over the sections or pavilions at the centre of each long frontage.

One source of inspiration for the design is clearly the architecture of chateaux and urban palaces in France from the 16th and 17th centuries so the style is generally described as French Renaissance although there is also a strong link to Danish architecture of the 17th century.

There were shops or commercial properties at street level with a lower-height mezzanine above and the most important apartments were on the second floor with balconies to the windows at that level with stone balustrades.

Inventories show that NA Scioldann, the builder of the apartments, lived in a large apartment in the building and he is credited with encouraging artists to move here to studios at the upper level.

A census of 1895, records that the prominent artist PS Kroyer had an apartment in Holckenhus, where he lived with is wife Marie Kroyer and three maids and a nurse for their new-born daughter, and the painters Agnes Slott-Møller and Emil Nolder are also known to have lived in the building.

Controversies over the future of Holckenshus aired in newspapers through last summer after the property was acquire by Blackstone - an American private equity fund - and there were reports that in their work to ‘upgrade’ the building, stained glass on staircases has been removed and high-quality and original woodwork on doors and staircases have been painted over but with details now picked out in gold.

However, the controversial and contentious proposal from Blackstone is to raise the roof between the towers to create eight luxury penthouse apartments. Clearly, the corner turrets and the central pavilions on each of the long facades is the key feature of the design of the exterior and a common roof line would undermine and change fundamentally the original concept.

The building is a major Danish cultural assets and not just the external appearance, in such a prominent position, should be preserved but features of the original interior have to be protected.

An article in Jyllands-Posten on 28 August 2019 Historisk bygning har huset Krøyer og andre store kunstnere: Renovering møder kritik by Ronja Melander has photographs of the interior and the web site of the Museum of Copenhagen has an article on the building and its occupants - Holckenhus - en beboelsesejendom med kunstneratelierer

Holckenhus has been added to the time line for apartment buildings on the site Copenhagen by design

 

the Boulevard in 1897 with the corner turrets of Holckenhus just visible (centre left) with the newly-completed Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek

 

traffic on HC Andersens Boulevard

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One of the paintings in the current exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen about the work of Paul Fischer is his view of HC Andersens Boulevard looking north towards the city hall from just before Dantes Plads on the right with the distinct building of what was then the new Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek on the left.

The first impression is that this must be a romanticised or highly edited view with people just sauntering across the boulevard but Fischer used his own photographs of the streets and squares in the city to compose what he painted and seems, generally, to have painted what he photographed.

So comparing the painting with a photograph taken last week you can see just how much space we have sacrificed to the car and just how much clutter there is with street signs and road markings.

When Fischer painted HC Andersens Boulevard there were trams running into the city hall square and out along Vesterbrogade and by then the railway line from the central station to Østerport had been constructed and suburban lines were being opened so public transport was well established.

Part of the problem with the Boulevard now is not just that there are three lanes of traffic between the lakes and the bridge over the harbour that run across the west side of the main city hall square but the traffic is unrelenting and although there are traffic signals - where pedestrians cross over - the traffic then sprints on to the next crossing so there can be noise and heavy fumes. The road has also taken over more and more of the width to allow for feeder lanes and particularly where vehicles back up before the lights waiting for them to change to let them cross over the traffic coming in the opposite direction.

One simple solution would be to drop the overall speed limit. This would not make it slower for the overall journey but simply control the cars racing to try and beat the next lights. It should also be possible at some junctions to stop traffic turning left, to cross over oncoming vehicles, by making cars turn right and then go round three sides of a block before crossing straight over at the junction where otherwise they would have turned left. Then, perhaps, some of the feeder lanes and the parking lanes could be taken over for wider pavements and more trees.

Paul Fischer exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen

painting of HC Andersens Boulevard that is currently in the exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen about the work of Paul Fischer and the same view photographed last week

 

HC Andersens Boulevard runs across the west (in this view the right) side of the city hall square with the Tivoli Gardens and then Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek before the harbour and Langebro. This aerial view shows just how much of the overall width - 50 metres from building front to building front - is tarmac and shows the chicanes at each junction.

When the square in front of the city hall was laid out and when these major buildings were constructed around 1900, Vester Voldgade on the east (left) side of the city hall was initially the main route down to the harbour and it follows the line of the road that was inside the city defences before the banks and outer ditches were removed in the late 19th century.

The original Langebro was at the end of Vester Voldgade and crossed to Christianshavn inside the defences on the line and angle that is now taken by Lille Langebro - the recently-opened bicycle bridge.