Thorald LÆSSØE 1816-1878, Copenaghen

After a brief apprenticeship with Danish “animalier” painter Christian Frederick Carl Holm, Thorald Læssøe occasionally followed courses at the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts, to then decide to dedicate himself to painting as a self-trained artist, along with his friends Johan Thomas Lundbye, Jens Adolph Jerichau, and Lorenz Frølich. Between 1845 and 1857 the artist lived in Rome, in a studio at the 33 Margutta Street. He will come back to Rome only in 1866, three years after his wife’s death, to remain until 1868. There is no doubt that the Roman stays had a significant impact on Læssøe’s art: indeed his paintings make an impression thanks to the strong hues and the artist’s ability to convey the Mediterranean light’s atmospheric iridescence, characteristic common to the majority of painters belonging to the Danish painting “Golden Age” of which Læssøe has been a pivotal figure. The work here presented shows the “Fontana Ovale”, one of the two fountains known as “Fontane Oscure” and located in a perspective position with respect to Museo Borghese boulevard sides. It is thought that the name “Fontane Oscure” is due to the trees’ shadow that immersed the fountain creating, during certain time of the day, surreal and magical atmospheres. They belong to the garden’s seventeenth century planning and are one of the villa’s most ancient fountains. The November-December 1977 exhibition at Palazzo Braschi in Rome, dedicated to Danish painters of the nineteenth century, saw exhibited four of his paintings entitled respectively, Le Terme di Caracalla, Veduta di Ariccia, La grotta di Egeria and Una pergola, and coming from the Museum of Fine Art Copenhagen the first two, the Soro Museum of Art the third work, and the last one comes from a Danish private collection.