Oil on canvas
45 x 47 cm
Signed and dated 1867
Painted at the age of just 21, Jerndorff's 'The Goose Tower in Vordingborg' captures the fleeting poignancy of a sunset. Looking up the hill, the late evening sunlight catches the tower and the wispy cirrus clouds above, as sheep, below, graze by a babbling brook. A bucolic scene, yet one twinged with the elegiac nostalgia of bygone halcyon days. To accompany the sunset, often seen as a marker of the day's end and the passing of time, crows surround the tower, traditionally symbolic of death. There is the suggestion the artist is pointing to the beauty of this moment while also referring to its finite and ungraspable nature.
The Goose Tower (Gåsetårnet), which getts its name from the golden goose that perches atop its spire is the only remaining part of the Vordingbord Castle. Built in 1175 by King Valdemar I of Denmark as both a defensive fortress and also a base from which to launch raids against the German German coast. The Vordingborg Castle is mostly a ruin these days but remains a symbol of the city and a significant monument.
August Jerndorff was born in Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, his father Just Ulrik Jerndorff was painter to the Oldenburg Court. Originally training in Copenhagen at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1863 to 1868 and he also studied privately with P. C. Skovgaard. Extremely decorated as an artist he received the Neuhausens Prize (1869) and, in 1875, worn the Royal Academy's travel scholarship to Italy, where he lived and worked from 1875 to 1878. In 1880, alongside Laurits Tuxen and Frans Schwartz he was a co-founder of a painting academy at Søkvæsthuset in Copenhagen, a precursor to Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler which were founded two years later. He received the Thorvaldsen Medal, highest distinction within the visual arts in 1884 and became a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1891. He received silver medals at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in both 1889 and 1900.
