Glazed stoneware, 1904. Size 44 x 41 x 28,2 cm. Inv. no. 225. Donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen.

Exhibitions

Kunstforeningen, Kbh. 1927.

Carl Peter Jacobsen (1819-1908)

The story goes that Carl Peter Jacobsen was the illegitimate son of one of the local gentry. His mother, who had been a maid at the manor, married the foreman, however, and they bought a little farm at Refsing Mark, where Carl Peter grew up. He worked as a hired hand for the parish clerk in Egtved, and on April 16, 1842, he married the clerk's daughter, Anna Kirstine Hansen. Niels Hansen Jacobsen's parents ran Holsted Inn for a number of years before they bought a farm in Vejen at the end of the 1850s. In addition to farming, Carl Peter Jacobsen also ran a lumber company.

Carl Peter's opinion of his son's work as an artist

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's father would have liked him to become a farmer and did not approve of his son's choice of career, even after he was an acclaimed artist. In a letter to his friend Axel Hou, dated October 4, 1934, Niels Hansen Jacobsen wrote of his father and the bust:

I had made a bust of father when he was old. When I thought I was finished with it, I said to him: "Well, what do you think of the bust?" He looked at it steadfastly with his light-blue, sharp eyes and said, "The longer it lasts, the worse it gets," and then he went off and moved his sheep.

A grandchild's story

In his biography of Niels Hansen Jacobsen, Niels Th. Mortensen quotes a granddaughter of Carl Peter Jacobsen with the following description:

Grandfather was one of those people who never failed to pass by without either making a correction or giving "an order." It was best to keep out of sight as much as possible.