Anton Melbye was born in 1818 in the harbour city of Copenhagen. He started his professional career at the school of ship construction before he applied himself in 1838/1839 to painting as a private pupil of C.W. Eckersberg and specialized on seascape painting. The voyages he made on the vessels of the Danish navy reflect in his work. Supported by the Danish royal court and honoured with prizes from the Academy of Art, he disengaged himself from Denmark’s national romanticist artistic community and left Copenhagen in 1847.
On his return in 1858 he was honoured with a membership in the Academy and in the Dannebrog order. In 1862, while living abroad again, he was awarded a professorship at the Academy of Art. In the 1840ies, he travelled along the mild coastlines of the Danish islands in the Baltic Sea, but in 1860 he was more attracted by the rough landscape of northwest Jutland.
In Paris he witnessed the revolution of 1848 before he gained recognition as a distinguished and treasured artist during the reign of Napoleon III. From 1848 until 1857, he participated in the exhibition of the Paris Art Salon. In 1855, 1862, 1867, and 1873 he took part in the world exhibitions. He maintained his ground in the deep-seated tradition of French marine painting.
He experimented with artistic techniques and art genres and developed his own bold style. Inspired by the French plain air artists, he moved inland, travelled through France, and produced complex charcoal and chalk drawings. In 1857, he married French born Alice Dupré.
In late 1871, the couple finally returned to Paris. Anton Melbye died after several years of illness in 1875 in Le Pecq near Paris.
In 1853/1854, Anton Melbye accompanied the French navy to the Marmara Sea and spent several months in Constantinople and the Bosporus. Greatly honoured by the Ottoman royal court and having received many commissions, he returned to France with sketches of the European fleet of warships that gathered during the Crimean War and with work-defining images of the sumptuous nature and the lucid colours of the south in his mind.
In Hamburg, the seaport and city of merchants, and the nearby Danish Altona, Anton Melbye acquired a circle of veritable patrons and art collectors who supported him and collected his work from 1840 onwards. His work was regularly displayed in local art exhibitions. The exhibition catalogues with Melbye paintings stated the names of the owners and read as a list of the rich and famous in Hamburg’s and Altona’s higher society at the time.
The close relationship between Germany and Denmark then maintained are reflected in the frequent exchange of art and culture in Hamburg. Anton Melbye’s first solo exhibitions were displayed in Hamburg in 1872 and 1900. From 1860 until 1871 Anton Melbye lived in Hamburg from where he undertook longer travels, mainly to France.
was the verdict of a Berlin art critic, according to whom Melbye’s works combined “Nordic accuracy with French vividness”. In contrast to C.W. Eckersberg’s sober and prosaic perception of art and nature, which greatly influenced the so-called Golden Age of Danish painting, Anton Melbye adhered more to the romantic movement and combined close examinations of nature with strong emotional impressions of nature.
Influenced by French art, his style of painting changed to large scale, impressively dramatic seascapes, in which the natural elements play the main role. With his extrovert and slightly eccentric personality, Anton Melbye delighted his audience with the realistic images of fluid worlds he created in which the forces of nature become a mirror for the human soul.
In his charcoal and chalk drawings of European landscapes and coastlines, Melbye developed his own aesthetic quality and style of mastery.
Picture excerpts Life stations Anton Melbye
1) Anton Melbye, An der Küste, 1840 (private collection)
2) Anton Melbye, Vollmondnacht, 1866 (private collection)
3) Anton Melbye, Im Marmarameer vor Konstantinopel, 1856 (private collection)
4) Anton Melbye, Der Orkan, 1866 (private collection)
Detail
Reproduktion einer historischen Fotografie von Anton Melbye, c. 1866 (private collection)