Constantin Hansen

Throughout his life in the 19th century, Constantin Hansen demonstrated his affinity for Danish history and government through his genre, portrait, landscape, and history paintings. When he was 21, Hansen’s parents both succumbed to typhus, establishing the young artist as the financial backbone of his younger sisters. Luckily, Hansen was a skilled painter enrolled in the Dutch Royal Academy and received numerous commissions that kept his family afloat. After studying in Italy and Germany, Hansen returned to Netherlands and sought to establish an artistic nationalism through history paintings based on Norse mythology and grand recreations of historic political moments.