Soren Emil Carlsen

Oil on canvas painting, 'Early Morning In Vejle Fjord' by Soren Emil Carlsen

Born Soren Emil Carlsen in Copenhagen around 1853, Carlsen first began his studies at the Royal Danish Academy as a teenager. Yet he was not to remain long there, leaving in 1872, at nineteen years old for America where he settled in Chicago, working for an illustration house to support himself. By 1875 he had saved enough money to travel to both Paris and Copenhagen to paint and study, staying for six months before returning to America, this time to New York. By this time he had already developed a unique love affair with the still life. In New York he befriended fellow painters such as John Francis Murphy; yet the city could not contain him and after only a year he relocated to Boston, making friends with the likes of Childe Hassam with whom he maintained a life-long friendship. Carlsen remained quite poor throughout his time in Boston where he spent the next eight years. Yet his abilities were developing quite rapidly in still life painting, in a style which scholars refer to as “kitchen still lifes.” that often included fish or birds paired with pots and pans suggesting the presence of a cook outside the frame and introducing a human element to still life subjects. This style very much echoed the work of the Dutch and Spanish Masters of still life, particularly that of Jean Simeon Chardin and, to a lesser degree, Johannes Vermeer. The similarity is not coincidental, as Carlsen spoke and wrote often of the influence of these artists on his own work, and yet he was already beginning to develop the eye for color, light and composition that today we regard as the undeniable Carlsen style. In 1884 Carlsen moved again to Paris, staying for two years. Here, as always he kept a low profile, preferring the mediation of working in the studio to the more social and recreational gathering places of artists and expatriates. In 1887 Carlsen moved to San Francisco, working for the directorship of the San Francisco Art Association School, and in 1891 moved back to New York where he lived until 1901. It is during this period, in the last decade of the nineteenth century that could be regarded as the most formative in terms of the development of the techniques that produced the paintings for which he is most celebrated today.