Soren Emil Carlsen (1853 to 1932)
Emil Carlsen grew up near the Baltic coast of Denmark, where the sea was a constant and powerful presence. Although he also distinguished himself as a painter of woodland landscapes and still lifes, it was his poetic depictions of the ocean and its shifting skies which earned him the greatest critical praise.
Whether painting the Danish shoreline, the many faces of the Pacific in California, the sandy beaches of Cuba or the cranky coast of Maine, Carlsen always rendered his scenes of water and sky in a strong envelope of atmosphere. He achieved this, in part, by applying selectively a lush impasto (often containing a lot of medium) to broad passages he designed to catch the light. In such areas, which he worked with a brushy vigor, Carlsen produced rich textures that enliven his surfaces through contrast with matte zones painted more thinly. These contrasts create a mood with a distinct emotional charge which few American sea painters besides Winslow Homer ever achieved.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, June 2009.
Emil Carlsen is counted among the important early California painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1853. At first pursuing a career in architecture, by the age of twenty he had emigrated to the United States, finding himself in Chicago beginning a career in painting. He studied briefly in Paris and returning to Chicago, began to teach at the Art Institute. He then moved on to San Francisco and shared a studio with his close friend from the Paris days, Arthur Mathews. Finding sales difficult in California, Carlsen again left for New York and Connecticut where his career turned more into a mode of success. He became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1906.
Carlsen, though chiefly self-taught, was most influenced by his stay in Paris and his study of French art. He is considered an impressionist, and his most successful period is characterized by softly colorful and delicate landscapes, seascapes, and in particular beautifully rendered still lifes in an almost Oriental manner in terms of objects and compositions. There is always a very ethereal sense of light in Carlsen’s most successful canvases. Carlsen was well-honored in his lifetime and won medals at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 and the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. He died in 1932.
Information courtesy of Charlton Hall Galleries, September 2005.