ArtistDanishb.1894–d.1948
Emanuel A. Petersen
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Emanuel Aage Petersen was born in Frederiksberg, Denmark in 1894 into a household where artistic ambitions were unwelcome - his father, a clergyman, disapproved of his son's creative inclinations. Petersen nevertheless trained as an apprentice house painter before securing a position at the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Factory, where he worked under a marine artist. That training in maritime subjects would shape the rest of his life.
Royal Copenhagen sent Petersen to the Mediterranean as a marine painter, but on returning to Denmark he grew restless. Seeking passage south on an A.P. Moller Maersk freighter, he found only northbound ships available. He accepted a berth to West Greenland, and the encounter with the Arctic proved decisive. What began as an accident of scheduling became a vocation that consumed nearly three decades.
Between 1921 and 1946 Petersen made repeated journeys to Greenland, eventually traveling to most of its inhabited settlements. He carried watercolors and drawing tools on location - oil paints and canvases were impractical in Arctic conditions - and completed his oil paintings back in Denmark, working from sketches and an apparently limitless visual memory. His ambition was to paint the entire coastline of the island, and he came close. By the end of his life he had produced close to 2,000 works with Greenlandic motifs.
What distinguishes his pictures is attention to light. The way polar sun falls across calm water, the silvery sheen on pack ice, the muted warmth on summer evenings near the coast - Petersen observed these conditions with a painter's precision and rendered them in a romantic idiom that was by his era already somewhat old-fashioned, yet entirely his own. Figures of Inuit women, hunters, and fishermen appear in many compositions, grounding the landscape in human presence. He received the nickname 'Grønlandsmålaren' - the Greenland Painter - in 1924, four years into his Greenlandic work.
Petersen was the last of a tradition of Danish artists who traveled to Greenland as documentary-romantic painters, at a time when photography had already assumed that documentary role. His last Greenland journey was in 1946. He died in 1948. The Nuuk Art Museum holds approximately 150 of his paintings along with a number of drawings and studies. An art museum in Ilulissat, in Disko Bay, is also dedicated to his memory.
On the Nordic auction market, Petersen's works appear almost exclusively at Bruun Rasmussen, which has handled all 16 works recorded on Auctionist. Prices in the database range from around 8,500 DKK for seascape compositions to 14,500 DKK for Arctic landscapes. Broader auction records show individual works reaching above 28,000 USD, with the strongest demand coming from collectors of Greenlandic and Arctic subject matter.