Plaster. Size 63,5 x 63,5 x 7,5 cm. Inv. no. 190. Gift from Peder Nyman, c. 1965.

The ballad of Agnete and the Merman

The relief is based on an old Danish ballad about the girl Agnete, who married a merman and was obliged to live on the bottom of the sea. One day she heard church bells and longed to come home. The merman let her go to church, but when Agnete heard the words of God, she no longer wanted to return to the sea even though the handsome merman begged her to return to him and their eight children.

Virtue and perdition

The sea is a dangerous element. Death by drowning threatens man, but for Agnete the danger lies in the sea as the mystical and enticing depths that engulf her. Only at the end does she return to the true path of virtue.

Part of a series

The same subject is modelled in a smaller ceramic relief. It hangs in the memorial rooms in the museum, and is mounted in a carefully executed wooden frame. It belongs to a series of reliefs of which today most are in private possession. They were studies for the larger plaster versions of which only "Agnete and the Mermaid" and "Scene from the ballad "Elverhøj" were executed. The two plaster reliefs used to decorate the dining room of the large Vejen property "Grønvang", home of Maren and Johannes Lauridsen. They were Hansen Jacobsens patrons and have both been portraid by the artist.