Evening Atmosphere

It is Sunday, so we continue our special month with the Statens Museum for Kunst's collection. Today we have a very interesting artist. :)

Perhaps the Danish artist who drew inspiration most proficiently from Japanese art is the still relatively unknown Henriette Hahn-Brinckmann. Among her color woodcuts, the 1904 work Evening Atmosphere, with a portrait of her friend, the Danish sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen, is one of the most distinctive. With its combination of the portrait in the foreground framed by hanging flowers against a background suggesting an atmospheric evening landscape, she has succeeded in taking inspiration from the Japanese woodcut to create a work that stands as an independent contribution to the Japonisme of the period.

She settled in Hamburg in 1894, established herself as an artist, and participated in numerous exhibitions, including the World Exposition in Paris in 1900 where she was awarded a silver medal for her color woodcuts. With exquisite technical skill and an acute awareness of the qualities of Japanese woodcuts, Henriette Hahn (who married Justus Brinckmann in 1904) became one of the pioneers of the Japanese-inspired reinterpretation of color woodcuts in 1890s Germany. Her lifelong work as an artist, which resulted in numerous notable works, has only recently received the attention it deserves in both a Danish and German context.

P.S. Want to know more about the western craze for Japanese art? Here's all you need to know about Japonisme. <3

P.P.S. We always want to promote women artists, also by producing our paper products for our Shop. Check out our Women Artists notebook here.