Lorenz Frølich

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Lorenz Frølich was born on the 25th of October 1820. He died on the same date in 1908, completing his eighty-eighth year on the very day of his birth. Carl Nielsen composed a cantata in his honor when Frølich turned eighty. The celebration took place at Koncertpalæet in Copenhagen on the 30th of November 1900. That a composer of Nielsen's standing wrote a ceremonial work for an illustrator says something about how Danish cultural life regarded Frølich. He was a painter, graphic artist, etcher, and illustrator. His illustrations, especially of children's books, were considered more important than his paintings. His career moved across Copenhagen, Dresden, Rome, and Paris. His images of Nordic mythology eventually appeared on the walls of civic buildings in his home city. His daughter Edma sat for his most celebrated picture books as a baby and a young child. All of it begins with an uncle who held the keys to a palace.

• 2. Through the Palace Gates

  ›

  The Frølich family lived in the first-floor apartment of the building at Store Kongensgade 81 in Copenhagen. His uncle's household occupied the ground floor of the same building. Lorenz's father, Johan Jacob Frølich, ran a trading firm in partnership with that uncle. His mother, Pouline Wilhelmine Tutein, was the daughter of Friederich Tutein, a wealthy wholesaler who also served as the Prussian consul in Copenhagen. The family belonged to the city's German reformed congregation.

  Johan Conrad Spengler held the position of inspector of Kunstkammeret, the royal collections, and he was Frølich's father's maternal uncle. Spengler used that position to give Frølich access to the galleries of Christiansborg Palace. Frølich was fond of drawing from early childhood. Those visits to the royal galleries offered access that no standard school enrollment could provide. Martinus Rørbye began giving him drawing lessons in 1833. He later studied under Christen Købke and then Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. In 1840, Frølich completed King Harald Bluetooth. That canvas predated his first European training by three years.

• 3. Two Continental Masters

  ›

  Eduard Julius Bendemann's studio in Dresden took Frølich on in 1843, and the arrangement lasted until 1846. Frølich painted Cupid and the Water-Sprite during these Dresden years; the work entered the collection of the Leipzig Museum.

  Thomas Couture in Paris received him for formal study in 1852, and the engagement ran through 1853. After Couture, Frølich spent much of his working life moving between Rome and Paris. He exhibited regularly at the Parisian salons, the annual exhibitions where European artists competed for standing. In 1877, the Royal Danish Academy of Art appointed him professor in Copenhagen. The professorship came while Frølich was already deep into a collaboration with the French publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Hetzel's illustrated albums would carry his work far beyond the salon circuit.

• 4. The French Albums

  ›

  In 1855, Frølich married Carolina Charlotta in de Betou, born in 1823. Their daughter Edma arrived in 1859. Edma Frølich would herself become a painter; she lived until 1958.

  As a baby and then a growing child, Edma modeled for the French albums her father created with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Those albums brought Frølich's illustration work to a broad readership. His children's book illustrations circulated well beyond the salons where his paintings competed. Carolina died in 1872. By then, Frølich had already furnished etchings for Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger's works and for illustrated surveys of Danish history.

• 5. Myths in Thread and Ink

  ›

  De tvende Kirketaarne, published in 1844 and written by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, was one of the projects for which Frølich furnished original etchings. The following year, Oehlenschläger's Die Götter des Nordens offered another vehicle for his imagery of the Norse gods. Illustreret Danmarkshistorie for Folket, issued between 1853 and 1855, added a third body of etching work. Beyond the page, Frølich painted a decoration in the Court of Appeals at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein. He also contributed to other public buildings in Denmark.

  Dagmar Olrik, born in 1860, was a painter and tapestry artist. She chose Frølich's cartoons of Nordic mythology as the basis for a major project in Copenhagen's City Hall. She and her assistants spent eighteen years decorating a single room there with tapestries drawn from his imagery. Olrik died in 1932. Among the canvases Frølich left behind was Family of a Wood-God. Its title places it in the same mythological territory that Olrik's tapestries covered in thread.