Plaster, 1897-1898. Bronze cast for Vejen Art Museum, date unknown. Size 75 x 84 x 270 cm. Inv. no. 138. Donated to the museum by Niels Hansen Jacobsen.

Exhibitions

Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1898.
One-man show at the Free Exhibition Building, 1901.
The Free Sculptors' Exhibition, 1906.

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's accompanying text

The following text was written by hand in the Skibelund catalogue, 1914:

Death:
at times it is invisible,
hides away in the dust of the road
but catches up and appears again
when we least expect it always creeping
in our footsteps
impossible to escape from.

The symbol of vanity

In this figure, Niels Hansen Jacobsen depicts something fleeting and intangible: a shadow. The shadow creeps over the earth with an infinitely long, soundless pace. The face is a grotesque mask, looking up, searchingly. In his left hand, the shadow holds an hourglass, the symbol of death and time. It is also a symbol of vanity, life's transitoriness. Other traditional symbols of vanity are the butterfly, withered flowers, and candles burning down.

Literary model

Niels Hansen Jacobsen might have been inspired by a story by Hans Christian Andersen entitled The Shadow, which tells about a shadow that takes command of his master and sends him to his death.

Niels Hansen Jacobsen on depicting death

After his major one-man show in 1901 at the Free Exhibition Building, Niels Hansen Jacobsen notified Carl Jacobsen that he could buy all the sculptures if he would put them on public display. His letter contains an interpretation of this piece:

I hope that you will acknowledge that I have achieved my goal of presenting "The Shadow" plastically. I wished to present Death with the fantastic and earth-bound appearance of the shadow; it seems more justified than using the absolutely human form. For it is not only man, but everything in the universe, that is transitory.

Niels Hansen Jacobsen's experiments with form

"The Shadow" is Niels Hansen Jacobsen's most radical experiment with form. The figure resembles a drifting mass of mist, its surface pierced by the now typical angular furrows, and the figure itself merges with the undulating mass that surrounds it. Seen from above, it looks like a section of an undulating, elegant Japanese woodcut, a genre that was cultivated in Paris during the 1890s. "The Shadow," with its horizontal composition, is quite special, and breaks with the classical ideal that a sculpture must have a completed form.