Emile Carlsen
Landscape
Oil on Canvas 18” x 23”
Wortsman and Rowe Gallery sticker
San Franciso, California
Biography by the staff of Columbus Museum, Georgia
Soren Emil Carlsen emigrated from Denmark and arrived in the United States in 1872, settling in Chicago. Although trained as an architect, he initially worked with Laurits Bernhard Holst, a Danish painter in Chicago, who gave over to Carlsen his studio when the instructor returned home. Carlsen remained mostly self-taught, and his early ventures to France included no formal instruction.
Ironically, Carlsen began teaching art in Chicago, at a school that would later become part of the Art Institute of Chicago. Carlsen’s early career also included subsequent moves to New York and Boston. Although he established himself as a painter, economic misfortune led him to work as an engraver and designer. By the 1880s, Carlsen was exhibiting his paintings more consistently, and he received a significant commission from a New York dealer to paint still-life images.
Art education played a role continuously throughout Carlsen’s career; he served as the Director of San Francisco Art Association’s school, and he taught at the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. (1) Although Carlsen’s oeuvre contains impressionistic landscapes and academic portraiture, his still-life paintings indicate his strongest and most successful painting explorations.
During the artist’s lifetime one critic noted, “Emil Carlsen is unquestionably the most accomplished master of still-life painting in America today. …It is evident that Carlsen has lifted his art to a height it has never reached before.” (2)
Carlsen’s first trip to Paris in 1875 fortuitously introduced him to the work of the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and Chardin’s incorporation of the seventeenth century Dutch still-life tradition. Compared to Carlsen’s contemporaries and considering his influence as a teacher, little has been written about Carlsen and his dedication to the still life. More than likely these biases results from the low esteem, which is relegated to still-life painting within the thematic hierarchy of painting. “Great art should be aesthetically demanding and it should be edifying and inspirational; still life is neither.” (3)
In his position as a teacher of younger generations of artists, Carlsen postulated on the status of still-life painting in an article he published in 1908. “…still life painting is considered of small importance in the Art schools, both here and abroad, the usual course being drawn from the antique, the nude, and painting the draped figure and from the nude. …Then why should the earnest student overlook the simplest and most thorough way of acquiring all the knowledge of the craft of painting and drawing, the study of inanimate objects, still life painting, the very surest road to absolute mastery over all technical difficulties.” (4)
Sources include:
1. For biographical information, see The Art of Emil Carlsen, 1853-1932 (San Francisco: Rubicon-Wortsman Rowe, 1975). Also, see Ulrich W. Hiesinger, Quiet Magic: The Still-Life Paintings of Emil Carlsen (New York: Vance Jordan Fine Art, 1999).
2. Arthur Edwin Bye, Pots and Pans or Studies in Still Life Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921), 213-214.
3. William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939 (Columbia, Miss.: University of Missouri Press, 1981), 22.
4. Ibid, 30. Quoted from Emil Carlsen, “On Still-Life Painting,” Palette and Bench (October 1908): 6-8.