Dec 1 2018 - Mar 24 2019
New London, CT
Emil Carlsen (1848-1932) is counted among the diverse group of American Post-Impressionist and realist painters who flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carlsen was an immigrant from Denmark at the age of nineteen, and he brought European academic training to his new life. Carlsen’s lush, painterly, and deeply satisfying paintings took French Impressionism and later Tonalists’ work a step further in the direction of serenity and quiet sensory beauty. His work reflects the American tendency to appreciate concrete form and clear meaning in subject matter.
While Carlsen has received much acclaim for his still-life paintings, he was also an accomplished landscape painter who was lauded by critics and collectors during his lifetime. This exhibit showcases his work as a landscape painter.
He maintained close friendships with many of the leading American painters of his day, including John Twachtman and J. Alden Weir, and won numerous awards for his works at prestigious venues such as the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 and the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926. He was a gifted teacher who influenced generations of artists through his insightful instruction and thoughtful philosophy. He taught for decades in Chicago and on both coasts, and he experienced the common plight of artists who struggled to sell their work in an American market that valued European work more highly than homegrown.
This exhibition emphasizes the critical importance of artists such as Carlsen, who influenced generations of artists not only through their own work but through their effective teaching philosophies and methods.