Diligence and Emotion: Knitting in Danish Golden Age Portraiture

Abstract

Wealthy ladies knitting provide a recurrent motif of Danish middle-class portraiture of the first half of the nineteenth century. This article explores the cultural and social significance of these images, and how they represent the central values of the Danish Golden Age (c.1810–1850). Since knitting was an essential skill for all women, this motif has traditionally been explained as part of the realist turn in Danish art. This article takes a new approach by arguing that the knitting carries an emotional value which has yet to be discussed by scholars. Displaying socially appropriate emotions was one way in which the middle classes distinguished themselves from the aristocracy and lower classes. On the one hand, sitters remained calm and collected and therefore rational. On the other, they needed to show emotional warmth, which was an obligatory marker of a good citizen. In order to balance the coolness of their expression, the emotional content of portraits was transferred to their material elements. The knitting of stockings in portraits thus became a tactile sign of romantic and maternal love. A young woman knitting for her future husband, or mother making stockings for her children, produced emotionally invested tokens of love. As a key marker of homemade love, the emotional warmth of these Golden Age portraits was carried by knitting as a textile symbol of emotion.

Keywords:

• women
• knitting
• handwork
• love
• portraiture
• Golden Age
• painting

Notes

1. “Le portrait, image quelquefois infidelle, souvent indiscrète, lorsqu’elle abandonne le sein des amours ou le temple de l’amitié pour s’offrir aux regards d’un public indifférent ou malin; le portrait, genre assez insignifiant dans une monarchie, parce qu’un seul homme y est tout et que les autres n’y sont rien, doit acqúérir dans une République un nouveau degré d’interêt: il peut consacrer alors des vertus, des talens, des services, des souvenirs. C’est dans un République qu’on salue avec respect les images du héros, de l’homme utile, de la femme estimable: sous le rapport moral et politique, il convient d’élever le genre du portrait.”

2. “L’attrait de la vie domestique est le meilleur contre-poison des mauvaises moeurs. Le tracas des enfans, qu’on croit importun, devient agréable; il rend le père & la mère plus nécessaires, plus chers l’un à l’autre, il resserre entr’eux le lien conjugal. Quand la famille est vivante & animée, les soins domestiques sont la plus chère occupation de la femme & le plus doux amusement du mari ... Qu’une fois les femmes redeviennent mères, bientôt les hommes redeviendront pères & maris.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Schram Vejlby

Anna Schram Vejlby is a curator at The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen, and is currently writing her PhD thesis on C.W. Eckersberg’s portraiture. She took her MA in art history at the University of Copenhagen in 2008, and has published on Danish and German nineteenth-century painting and on contemporary installation art.[email protected]