Søren Emil Carlsen
(b Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 Oct 1853; d New York, NY, 2 Jan 1932).
American painter of Danish birth. He immigrated to the USA in 1872 after studying architecture at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in his native Copenhagen. In 1874 he worked under Danish painter Lauritz Holtz in Chicago. After six months study in Paris (1875), he returned to Chicago to teach at the newly founded Academy of Design. Back in Paris (1884-6) for further study of the works of Jean-Siméon Chardin, he produced floral still-lifes for New York dealer Theron J. Blakeslee. America's leading exponent of the Chardin Revival, Carlsen eventually became his adopted country's most famous depicter in paint of fish, game, bottles and related 'kitchen' still-life subjects. A typical fish portrait recently hung in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, near a similar piscean image by one of Carlsen's main competitors in the genre, William Merrit Chase, whose famous fish still-life, An English Cod (1904; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.), also provides a revealing comparison.
Carlsen moved in 1887 to San Francisco, where he had been invited by portraitist Mary Curtis Richardson to succeed Virgil Williams (1830-86) as director of the California School of Design. He later taught at the San Francisco Art Students' League. During his four productive and influential years in California, he shared a Montgomery Street studio with Arthur F. Mathews. Unfortunately, exhibition and sales opportunities proved to be limited, and Carlsen, by then penniless, was forced in 1891 to relocate to New York, where his fortunes improved dramatically. Still-life (1891; Oakland, CA, Mus.) dates from the year of his move east and is typical of the work that established his considerable reputation in New York and launched a long and successful career there. Despite the growing popularity of Impressionism, Carlsen's palette, which tended towards ivory, silver-grey and mauve, remained subdued, in a near monochromatic, realist manner close to that of the Munich-style Chase or Frank Duveneck. However, his massing of broad areas of color and reductive approach lends a modernist quality to many of his paintings. Works such as Still-life, Pheasant (1891; San Francisco, CA, private col.), in which a superbly painted dead pheasant is placed alone on a bare tabletop, reveal Carlsen's interest in formal construction and the abstract opportunities his chosen, traditional subjects provided him.
While in San Francisco, Carlsen exhibited regularly at the Bohemian Club, of which he was and remained a member. Other exhibitions during his lifetime included those at: the National Academy of Design, New York (1885-7, 1894-5, 1903, 1905-21, 1923-32); the Mechanics Institute, San Francisco (1887, 1888); the San Francisco Art Association, c. 1890-97; the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St Louis (1904); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1912); and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco (1915). The largest exhibition during the artist's lifetime was mounted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1923, nine years before his death. At that time, Carlsen was described as 'unquestionably the most accomplished master of still-life painting in America' (Arthur Edwin Bye). (Source: PAUL J. KARLSTROM, "(Soren) Emil Carlsen," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press) Accessed February 9, 2004) http://www.groveart.com
