A Danish eye on the Golden Age

This February, a small but significant selection of Danish Golden Age paintings will be shown at Phillips’ booth at the Gstaad Art Fair. For most visitors, it will be an encounter with a quietly powerful chapter of European art history. For me, as a Dane, it is something more unusual: the experience of seeing a large part of my own cultural heritage surface far from home, all at once.

The works on view form part of an extraordinary private collection assembled by John L Loeb Jr, former United States Ambassador to Denmark. Over several decades, he built what is widely regarded as the most important collection of Danish Golden Age painting held outside Denmark. The collection comprises around 150 works, including famous paintings by Vilhelm Hammershøi, Anna Ancher, P.S. Krøyer, Christen Købke and other central figures of the period.

Later this year, the collection will be dispersed at auction: first in London in March, then in New York in May. Phillips has indicated a total estimate of USD 15–18 million, which underscores both the rarity and the international standing of these works. It is exceptionally uncommon for so many museum-quality Danish paintings to appear on the market at once. To see so many gathered, knowing they are in transition, moving from one private world to another, is rare. Almost unheard of. I find this both astonishing and quietly emotional.

What makes the moment striking is not only its scale but also its concentration. The Danish Golden Age was never about abundance or excess. These artists painted interiors, light-filled rooms, coastal edges, everyday labour, and domestic stillness. Their strength lies in restraint and precision, in a way of seeing that privileges atmosphere over drama.

That sensibility translates surprisingly well to Gstaad. The setting may be Alpine rather than Nordic, but there is a shared understanding of proportion, quiet and space. Of places that value understatement over spectacle. Seeing these works here, in a temporary pause before they move on again, creates a particular tension: between intimacy and global circulation, between cultural origin and international appetite.

For collectors, this presentation offers rare access. For me, it carries a different weight. These paintings belong to Denmark’s visual language. They shaped how we understand light, home, landscape and presence. Knowing that they will soon scatter into new collections across the world is both inevitable and poignant, part of the natural life of art, but also a moment worth marking.

Art lives through movement. It shifts context, acquires new meanings, and enters fresh conversations. This brief appearance in Gstaad is one such moment: a crossroads between history, place, and the market, and an extraordinary chance to look closely at a body of work that would usually be found in museums or private homes.

JEANETTE WICHMANN
 

Where: MAZE ART GSTAAD, at the Sportszentrum in Gstaad | When: 19 – 22 February 2026
Link to the full catalogue here