Plaster, 1905. Size 195 x 184 x 102 cm. Inv. no. 147. Donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen.

Exhibitions

The Free Sculptors' Exhibition, 1905

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's accompanying text

Printed in the catalogue for the Free Exhibition, 1905:

... the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else save what beats there.

Shakespeare's King Lear

In the catalogue, Niels Hansen Jacobsen notes that these three lines were taken from Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear (Act 3), the story of the aging king who divides his realm between his two oldest daughters, who have curried his favor with empty flattery. As soon as he abdicates, his daughters banish him. The youngest daughter, the only one who truly loves her father, appears with an army to return him to his throne. Although the tragedy ends with the death of both daughter and father, he finally realizes what true love is. The sculpture shows King Lear wandering over the heath, distrought and bordering on madness.

An image of sorrow

The sculpture deals with emotions such as impotence, sorrow and mental anguish, reflected in the external raging of the elements. It is an expressive figure that differs significantly from Niels Hansen Jacobsen's earlier work.

The sculpture was the first major project that Niels Hansen Jacobsen tackled after the death of his wife, Gabriele, in 1902, and has been interpreted as a kind of intellectual identification with Shakespeare's figure. In the meantime, however, Niels Hansen Jacobsen also had time to complete "Our Mother Tongue" and a monument for Rødding Folk High School, and had begun to work with ceramics once again. The link between the artist's life and his work is hardly unequivocal, though sorrow cannot have been a foreign emotion to Hansen Jacobsen. Much later, he dealt with the theme in a very different way, calm and melancholy, in "Sorrow," which was later incorporated in the group "Playing to the Tune of Life".