ArtistDanish
Knud Kyhn
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Born in Copenhagen on 17 March 1880, Knud Carl Edvard Kyhn grew up in a family already steeped in art, his uncle was the landscape painter Vilhelm Kyhn. He trained at the Kunstnernes Studieskole and in the atelier of Karl Schröder in Lillerød, and made his public debut at the Charlottenborg exhibition in 1906. From 1908 onward he was a regular contributor to the Frie Udstilling, the progressive alternative to the official salon, where his paintings and illustrations won him an audience beyond the ceramics world.
Kyhn's long engagement with Danish manufactory ceramics unfolded across three separate spells at Royal Copenhagen (c. 1903-1910, c. 1924-1932, c. 1936-1967), with intervening periods at Bing & Grøndahl (1908-1915, 1933-1935) and Herman A. Kähler's pottery (c. 1920-1924). Each house gave him different technical resources, and he used them all toward the same end: translating living animals into clay with psychological as well as anatomical accuracy.
His method was rooted in direct observation. The Copenhagen Zoo, situated near the Royal Copenhagen factory in Frederiksberg Gardens, was effectively his second studio. He filled sketchbooks there with rapid studies of apes, bears, elephants and big cats, notes on posture and weight that he then resolved into three-dimensional forms. The resulting figures avoid the stiff nobility of traditional decorative sculpture. They catch animals mid-movement, at rest, or interacting with each other, with a quality of arrested life that collectors still find compelling.
The surface treatment was as distinctive as the modelling. Kyhn worked extensively with the Sung flambé glaze, a technique derived from Chinese Song dynasty tradition, enriched with iron or cobalt oxides and fired at high temperature. The glaze pools in the recesses of a form and breaks into warm amber, brown and blue-grey across raised surfaces, so that glaze and sculpture read as a single object rather than a body with a coating applied over it.
In 1934, alongside his factory work, Kyhn opened an independent studio at his home in Farum together with his wife Julie Bloch Kyhn. Work produced there carries the mark FK for Farum Keramik, and it represents a more personal strand of his output, smaller editions, sometimes less polished, but with an experimental freedom that the manufactory context did not always allow.
His stoneware contributed to Royal Copenhagen's success at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, one of the defining international showcases for Scandinavian applied arts between the wars. He continued working at Royal Copenhagen until late in life, dying on 23 November 1969 at the age of 89.
On the Nordic auction market, Kyhn's ceramic work circulates steadily, with the strongest demand concentrated in Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The 83 lots recorded on Auctionist span Bruun Rasmussen, Palsgaard, Woxholt, SAV Helsinki and Halmstads, among others. Top results include a Sung-glazed owl with mouse stoneware piece realizing 11,500 DKK, and Royal Copenhagen stoneware figures reaching 6,500-6,600 SEK. Larger, rarer models, particularly the big-cat series and unusual subjects, consistently outperform estimates. His paintings appear at auction more rarely and at lower price points than his ceramics.