KunstenaarDanish
Johannes Larsen
2 actieve items
Johannes Larsen was born on 27 December 1867 in Kerteminde, a small fishing town on the northeast coast of Funen, Denmark. His father was a merchant, and the harbour, the tidal flats and the birdlife of the Kerteminde Fjord shaped his eye from childhood. When he went to Copenhagen to study under Kristian Zahrtmann at the Free School in the late 1880s, he met Fritz Syberg and Peter Marius Hansen, two painters from the southern Funen town of Faaborg. That encounter planted the seed of what would become the Funen Painters (Fynboerne), a loose colony bound by a commitment to painting the landscape and people of their home island outdoors, away from the academic conventions of the capital.
Larsen married the painter Alhed Maria Warberg in 1898, and between 1901 and 1902 the couple built a home on Møllebakken above Kerteminde. The house became the colony's gravitational centre each summer, drawing younger painters from Zahrtmann's circle and cementing Kerteminde as a quiet but productive counterweight to Copenhagen's art establishment. While his Fynboerne colleagues became known for figure and landscape painting, Larsen carved out a distinct territory: birds, observed with an ornithologist's patience and a painter's economy.
He worked across oil, watercolour and woodcut, and it was the woodcut that gave his bird subjects their most distilled form. He illustrated E. Lehn Schiøler's monumental ornithological publication Danmarks Fugle, contributing more than a hundred original watercolours across three completed volumes before Schiøler's death in 1929 cut the project short. In 1925 Larsen joined the ornithological expedition to Greenland, spending months observing and drawing Arctic species at first hand. The results deepened the factual accuracy of his later work without ever tipping it into scientific illustration.
His public commissions moved in a different register: large decorative paintings for the Queen's receiving room at Christiansborg Castle and for Odense City Hall placed him inside the institutions of Danish civic life. Yet it is the smaller panels and prints, the eiders in low flight, the yellowhammer on a fruit-tree branch, that have remained most sought after. His house on Møllebakken was converted into the Johannes Larsen Museum in 1986 and today holds a permanent collection alongside temporary exhibitions.
On Auctionist, Larsen is represented by 28 items, with 4 currently active. Work appears primarily through Danish auction houses, with Bruun Rasmussen (Lyngby and Aarhus branches together accounting for 17 lots) and Svendborg Auktionerne (7 lots) dominating his market. Top results in our database include a spring-study oil that reached 35,800 SEK and a signed monogram study of flying common scoters that sold for 26,000 DKK. Drawings sit alongside paintings in roughly a two-to-three ratio, confirming that collectors value his works on paper nearly as highly as his oils.