Hans Jørgen Hammer

Hans Jørgen Hammer (29 December 1815 – 28 January 1882) was a genre, landscape, and portrait painter and printmaker of the Golden Age of Danish painting.

As a boy Hammer displayed an aptitude for drawing, and he received his first training from the Norwegian-Danish master Jon Gulsen Berg (1783–1864), a court painter and wallpaper designer.

[1] Like many Academy students, Hammer was strongly influenced by Niels Laurits Høyen, an early champion of the National Romantic movement who advanced a new Nordic understanding of culture and art, advising students to eschew travel to foreign lands and urging them to portray the Danish people of humble agricultural origins in rural settings where folkways were as yet untouched by industrialization.

In 1847 he won the Neuhausen Prize (De Neuhausenske Præmier [da]) with Farmboys and Girls Gather for Outdoor Merrymaking on a Holiday Afternoon, another nostalgic work purchased for the Royal Painting Collection.

In the years following Denmark's fragile victory, he remained on active duty with the rank of captain before shifting to the reserves and finally leaving the service entirely in 1860.

Prior to the war Hammer had been encouraged to apply for a stipend to cover the expense of a sojourn in Italy, and finally at the age of 41 he traveled there with the financial support of the Academy of Fine Arts.

[1][2] His likeness is preserved in a portrait by Constantin Hansen (1863), a woodcut after a Bertel Christian Budtz Müller studio photograph, and various self-portraits, including one drawn in pencil and held by the Frederiksborg Museum.