The featured painter in my next two blogs is the Danish artist,
Christen Købke, who lived in Denmark in the first half of the
nineteenth century, a period which was to become known as den
danske guldalder (the Danish Golden Age). The paintings I am
looking in this blog feature the Frederiksborg Palace, sometimes
referred to as the Frederiksborg Castle, the majority of which
was built as the royal residence of King Christian IV the ruler
of the joint kingdoms of Denmark and Norway between 1602 and
1620. Christen Købke was born in May 1810 in Copenhagen. He had
an unremarkable upbringing. He came from a well-to-do family, at
the head of which was his father, Peter Berendt Købke and his
mother Cecilie Margrete Købke (née Petersen). Christen was one
of eleven children, five boys and six girls. His father Peter,
like his father before him, was a baker and owned a bakery in
the town of Hillerød, some twenty miles north of Copenhagen,
which was also the location of the Frederiksborg Castle. At the
age of five, the K