In collections and storages of Danish museums, it is possible to find over 300 paintings and drawings by the Danish artist Hans Smidth (1839-1917). He was acknowledged and respected in his time for his depictions of the landscape and rural life in Jutland, Denmark.
Nevertheless, after his death, he disappeared into oblivion, and now appears as an unexplored and incomprehensible figure in the narration of Danish art history.
Smidth created his art during a time of unrest and upheaval from the 1860s until his death in 1917. It was a time when the patriotism of the Danish national romanticism and the focus on genre painting were challenged by new European artistic styles, the dominant ones being naturalism, realism, and impressionism. Hans Smidth never traveled abroad like many of his artist colleagues did, and in general we do not know much about what he wanted to do with his art and where he found his inspiration. He was described as an “odd mixture of the old-fashioned and the modern, of tradition and personality”. He can be considered as being an unclassified, marginalized artist, who has been difficult to place within the writings of art history and museum collection presentations.
With an art historiographical and museological framework, the aim of Tilde Mønsted Kleins PhD-project is to investigate methods of how Hans Smidth can be reactualized and reinterpreted in a historical, art-theoretical and aesthetic perspective.
