Getty Museum

Portrait of Peder Hjort

Date

about 1818–1819

Medium

Graphite and ink

Culture

German

Department

Drawings

Institution

Getty Museum

This sheet is a small-format portrait of Peder Hjort made to commemorate the close friendship between an artist and a critic who strove to promote similar aesthetic ideals. Hjort was a Danish writer and art critic, who greatly advanced the classicizing ideals of his compatriot Bertel Thorvaldsen's sculpture abroad in Rome. Hjort's wish to establish a collection of sculptures by Thorvaldsen came to fruition in 1848 when a museum dedicated to the sculptor opened in Copenhagen. Barth arrived in Rome in 1817, and he quickly became associated with the Nazarenes-a group of artists who lived a monastic life and set about to purify art by reviving the spirit and style of religious painting. In addition to making masterful small-format portrait drawings of his Nazarene associates, Barth developed a reproductive engraving style that was very influential in the dissemination of his own friends' work, especially that of Thorvaldsen. Made as an independent work, this sheet is composed like a miniature with fine lines of a sharp pencil. It reveals the ease, vigor, and elegance of the soft silvery strokes that one finds in Barth's other portraits of his friends in Rome. Through the direct gaze, placement of the sitter in the immediate foreground, and amazing sense of preternatural light, Barth conveys a great intensity of expression.

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