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Night

1895

Full size, 29K

 

Plaster, 1895. Size 75 x 367 x 144 cm. Donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen. Bronze cast funded by Sparekassen Sydjylland (now BG Bank, Nørregade), Vejen, 1967. Inv. no. 136.

 

Exhibitions

Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1895.
Charlottenborg, 1896.
One-man show at the Free Exhibition Building, 1901, under the title "Darkness."

 

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's accompanying texts

From the exhibition at Charlottenborg 1896:

Night
With bleeding wounds
for billions of years
He has striven with the day,
been humbled.
He still shades his eyes
And waits for the moment
When day is vanquished
Forever.

In 1914, Niels Hansen Jacobsen printed another text in the catalogue for his studio/museum at Skibelund Krat:

Night rising
For millennia he has hidden himself from light's enormous might, humiliated and cowed; still, he awaits his foe's impotence in order to rule supreme.

 

The motif

We know of no literary model for the sculpture. Niels Hansen Jacobsen personified Night as a demonic figure with pointed bat's ears and wings instead of arms. The figure creeps over the earth with one unfolded wing stretched forth. As darkness falls, it glides across the surface of the earth.

 

The sculpture's design

The design of this figure was a new departure. Niels Hansen Jacobsen began to work abstractly with the surface. This can be seen most clearly in Night's face, where the fundamentally human features are broken up by furrows and lines that instead of being anatomically correct have an abstract character.

 

A new sculptural ideal

Niels Hansen Jacobsen probed the fierce and expressive, movement and imbalance. In doing so, he broke with the classicist ideal of sculpture, which demanded harmonious, well-proportioned, static, and well-balanced figures, an ideal that was exemplified in Denmark by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844).

Bertel Thorvaldsen, "Night," 1815

 

Niels Hansen Jacobsen on Thorvaldsen

While he was still quite young, Niels Hansen Jacobsen deliberately wished to break with the classicist tradition and Thorvaldsen. When he was older, however, he spoke of Thorvaldsen as one of his sources of inspiration.

We artists are no longer allowed, as Thorvaldsen was, to sit in Rome and imitate Antiquity; we must use our lives and souls and all our striving skill to join the modern struggle and progress and give the defeats and victories of a new life new artistic expression !

Niels Hansen Jacobsen, 1899

 

Stephan Sinding

An exponent of the break with Thorvaldsen in Denmark was the Norwegian-Danish artist Stephan Sinding (1846-1922), who is represented at the museum with the sculpture "Mother Earth," found north of the museum facing the intersection of Østergade and Østerallé.

The sculpture "Mother Earth" is lifted in place.

Photo: Pernille Klemp

 

Auguste Rodin

An important source of inspiration was the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), whom Niels Hansen Jacobsen met in Paris. What Niels Hansen Jacobsen was able to use in Rodin's work was first and foremost his departure from conventions: an entirely new approach to balance, proportions, and surface. Rodin's sculptures are expressive and passionate, and do not respect the classical ideals of harmony and balance.

Auguste Rodin, "Honoré de Balzac," 1891-1898

 

The sculpture cast as a present to the town

In conjunction with its centenary, Sparekassen Sydjylland, present-day BG Bank on Nørregade, decided to give Vejen a present: a bronze cast of "Night." The sculpture was unveiled in 1968 at the inauguration of the bank's new premises. It stood in front of the bank until 1989, when it was moved to the museum's grounds. In 1994, it proved necessary to move the figure indoors to the museum's Sculpture Hall because of a crack in the extended wing.