Kongelys 1950’s Tablelamp

in brass and acrylic,

by Niels Rasmussen Thykier

for Fog & Mørup

By the early 1970s Fog & Mørup had reached its prime, with sales in 1972 in excess of 50 million Danish kroner and an export market growing at 30 per cent per annum. The company’s belief that ‘presented with a challenge, designers as individuals or in design groups will achieve their finest work’ enabled them to attract many talented architects and designers to work under Hammerborg’s exacting eye, including Sophus Frandsen, Claus Bonderup and Torsten Thorup, Jørgen Bo, E Balslev, Karen and Ebbe Clemmensen, Sidse Werner, Hans Due and Peter Avondoglio.

Niels Rasmussen Thykier is best known for his designs for decorative objects such as his highly stylised mid-20th century Kongelys table lamps. His interest in highly effective but restrained artificial light is present in the current painting, which was exhibited alongside 5 other paintings by the artist in 1912.
The interior of Hagemanns Kollegium is depicted with Jens Ferdinand Willumsen’s painting A Mountain climber (1904) in the centre of the room surrounded by diffused light and music. The composition of the painting is perfectly inkeeping with contemporary sources (fig. 1.).
Jens Ferdinand Willumsen (1863-1958) is best known for his painting A Mountain Climber (1912, SMK collection, Denmark), depicting his second wife, Edith Wessel, gazing across a monumental Alpine landscape. It is a work which encapsulates Symbolism and Vitalism.
Willumsen had originally depicted the subject in 1904, in a painting which was hung in the G.A. Hagemann’s Kollegium when it was established in 1908, and remains in place to this day. Hagemann refused to loan the painting to an international exhibition, and so Willumsen painted a second version in October 1912, which now hangs in the SMK, Copenhagen.

produced by Fog & Mørup, 1950s Denmark

Made from brass and acrylic

W 45 D 45 H 54 cm

Available