David Monies
Place Born
CopenhagenPlace Died
CopenhagenBio
David Monies enjoyed a successful career as a genre and portrait painter, and as a lithographer. He was born into a Jewish family in Copenhagen, and attended the Royal Academy of Painting where he was a student of J. L. Lund and C. W. Eckersberg. Painting at the height of the Golden Age, Monies was immersed in a vibrant culture notable for the work of such figures as the writer Hans Christian Andersen, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and the physicist H. C. Ørsted.
The art of the period was perhaps its greatest achievement. The sculpture Bertel Thorvaldsen and the painter Eckersberg led an artistic renaissance during the Golden Age that produced, with the establishment of an academy in Charlottenborg in 1754, the artists Christen Købke, Jens Juel, Constantin Hansen, Martinus Rørbye, J. Lundbye, Wilhelm Bendz, Emanuel Larsen, and David Monies to name a few. The Royal Collections, what was later to become the National Collection after the peaceful transition to a constitutional monarchy, actively supported these new artists, buying these modern pictures the moment they were exhibited. In the face of such disasters as the overwhelming defeat of their famed navy by the British in 1801, the English bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 that destroyed hundreds of buildings in the small city and damaged over a thousand, and the declaration of national bankruptcy in 1813 and subsequent loss of Norway, Danish culture flourished with a willful energy and a unique character.