Hirschsprung Collection

The Hirschsprung Collection is one of Copenhagen's most underrated museums — a small, elegant collection of Danish Golden Age and Skagen paintings in a purpose-built neoclassical building in Østre Anlæg park, just south of the National Gallery. The collection focuses on 19th-century Danish art: Eckersberg, Kobke, the Skagen painters (P.S. Kroyer, Michael and Anna Ancher), and their contemporaries.

The Skagen room is the highlight: luminous paintings of the northernmost tip of Denmark, where the light is extraordinary and the artists who gathered there in the 1880s and 1890s documented it obsessively. The museum is small enough to see in an hour without fatigue. Entry is inexpensive; combined with the Statens Museum next door it makes for an excellent morning of Danish art.

things to do museum indre by
A story
Heinrich Hirschsprung was a tobacco manufacturer who collected Danish art so aggressively that by the 1890s he had a collection too large for any private home. He commissioned a neoclassical building in the style of the houses depicted in his paintings, filled it with his collection, and gave the whole thing to the Danish state in 1902. The building and collection together are one of the most coherent acts of cultural patronage in Danish history.

Other places in Indre By / City Centre