Plaster, 1896-1897. Bronze cast for Vejen Art Museum, date unknown. Size 115 x 193 x 61 cm. Inv. no. 137. Donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen.

Exhibitions

Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1897.
One-man show at the Free Exhibition Building, 1901.
The Free Sculptors' Exhibition, 1906.
The Free Exhibition, 1935.
The Free Exhibition, 1938, sketch.

A metaphor of the fall of genius

In 1901, in conjunction with the major one-man show at the Free Exhibition Building, Niels Hansen Jacobsen and his wife, Gabriele, wrote to Carl Jacobsen, offering him all of the sculptures for public display, an offer that Carl Jacobsen rejected. The letter to Carl Jacobsen contained an interpretation of "Freedom in Our Time":

The old man does not completely suit the title ("Freedom at the End of the Century") that it was given. It was my intention for him to express what has happened to so many valuable people who have benefited the world far into the future but have been overcome in their struggle, without ever having received any support or understanding. By using this curious form, I wished to express the offensiveness and tragedy that are often the distinctive features of genius. Perhaps I should have called this figure "A Genius's Fall." I believe he is the most beautiful in composition and in treatment of - if I can put it this way - new material using the human form as a model.

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's accompanying text

The Skibelund catalogue, 1914, and the Free Exhibition catalogue, 1935:

I have seen a man, poor, bowed-over, and tired of life; he was looking for a tree under which to rest and find shade, but he found only a rotten trunk without leaves. This was freedom in our time.

Artistic freedom in Niels Hansen Jacobsen's time

Artistic freedom was a topic that concerned many artists, including Niels Hansen Jacobsen. The artist was viewed as a visionary who was especially attuned to his time. When Niels Hansen Jacobsen wrote of his sculpture, "I have seen...," he was speaking of an inner vision in keeping with this view.

Niels Hansen Jacobsen rarely carried out commissions. This gave him freedom in the creative process, but his new experiments with form were not always well-received. Like many artists, Niels Hansen Jacobsen had financial problems, since it was not easy for him to sell his symbol-charged, thematically "dark" sculptures. His main income came from the sale of his ceramics, and from carving tombstones.

Political freedom in Niels Hansen Jacobsen's time

The 1890s was a time of conflicts. Though rapidly increasing industrialization brought with it widespread hope for the future, a fear of the new engendered great pessimism. There was a wide gap between rich and poor. This was also the period when socialistic movements got under way, some of them radically anarchistic. The Dreyfus affair was raging in France and led to numerous political crises and corruption trials.

Between 1885 and 1894, Denmark was governed by J. B. C. Estrup (1825-1913) with the help of provisional finance acts, legislation that had not been passed by Parliament. Democracy was in fact suspended. Estrup rejected proposals for universal suffrage and the demands for parliamentary rule put forth by the Social Liberal Party (Venstre).