A New Work by Julius Exner
In the summer of 2019, the museum received a donation of Julius Exner’s 1868 painting Portrait of Jenny Raphael Adler with Her Daughters Ellen, Hanna and Emma. The painting is now on display at the museum.
Julius Exner: Portrait of Jenny Raphael Adler with Her Daughters Ellen, Hanna and Emma, 1868.
In this group portrait, Jenny Raphael Adler is seated in the family drawing room with her three daughters. She sits by the window with her crochet work, while the girls are gathered around the table in the centre of the room.
Jenny Raphael Adler was married to the Danish banker and politician David Baruch Adler, with whom she had six children. The remaining members of the family are represented on the wall behind them. To the left hangs a photograph of the three sons, Martin, Emil and Bertel, while a photographic portrait of their father hangs to the right.
Ellen, the youngest daughter, proudly shows her writing slate to her older sisters, Hanna and Emma, who look up from their books. Ellen later became the mother of the renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr. Hanna, the daughter in the centre, was one of the first Danish women to earn an advanced degree in physics. She also founded H. Adler’s Coeducational School, now known as Sortedam School in Copenhagen’s Østerbro district. It was one of the first schools in Denmark in which boys and girls were taught together. The eldest daughter, Emma, later married the politician and educationalist Herman Trier.
The painting relates to several other portraits of children from the period in the museum’s collection, including C.W. Eckersberg’s Group Portrait of C.F. Holm’s Children from 1832 and Christen Købke’s Two Children Reading. The Artist’s Son Peter and His Niece Cecilie Feilberg, Later Gottlieb from 1845. These works also depict children reading. Children’s literature became increasingly popular during the Danish Golden Age, and the intimacy created by gathering around a book became a recurring subject in portraits of children.
In 1901, Jenny Raphael Adler donated P.S. Krøyer’s masterpiece Italian Village Hatters, painted in Sora in 1880, to the Hirschsprungs’ art collection.
The group portrait remained in the family’s possession until 2019, when it was donated to the museum. This was not the first time The Hirschsprung Collection had received a work from the family. As early as 1901, Jenny Raphael Adler gave P.S. Krøyer’s 1880 masterpiece Italian Village Hatters to Heinrich Hirschsprung’s art collection.