About 215 years ago, Jens Juel (1745-1802) painted an unusual portrait of two members of the royal family: Crown Princess Marie and her daughter, Princess Caroline. The portrait is unusual in representing the crown princess as a mother on an everyday stroll through a garden. Devoid of symbols of status or power, the painting shows a close and warm moment shared by mother and daughter.
The painting, which was acquired on auction, and which is now on display at Rosenborg alongside ten other works by Jens Juel, was purchased with support from Augustinus Fonden, the Agency for Culture and Palaces and the New Carlsberg Foundation.
On flat feet
Jens Juel became the court portrait painter in 1780, and most of the members of the Danish royal family were portrayed by him several times. Crown Princess Marie had been portrayed eight years earlier, in a large painting measuring more than two metres in height, and Juel had portrayed her husband, the future King Frederik 6, already shortly before his confirmation in 1783.
In Juel’s paintings, grace is united with realistic depictions. The representation of the country’s crown princess walking on her flat feet in a garden would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier. Around the turn of the century, Juel did many paintings of mothers with children, where in the spirit of the time, the children were allowed to express themselves, and family feelings were represented in a new way. With the French Revolution came a liberation of the arts, which Juel had witnessed during his many years of travelling abroad, and he was therefore able to live up to, for the time, modern demands and expectations of art which were also emerging in Denmark,’ says Jørgen Selmer, museum director at Rosenborg.
A studio visit
The painting is not signed or dated, but two contemporary sources exist.
In Juel’s later years, the future King Christian 8 regularly visited Juel’s studio to see what the artist was working on. After a visit to the studio on 25 January 1800, the future king wrote to his father, ‘Papa, my siblings and I have visited Juul (sic) to see a painting of the crown princess and Caroline.’
The other source is a watercolour by C. Zeuthen, which shows the study and bedroom of King Frederik 6. The watercolour was painted in 1840, following the king’s death, and shows the painting hanging on the wall behind the king’s bed.
