This drawing, depicting harbour workers at the edge of a canal, awaiting the arrival of a cargo ship, was executed by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg around 1840. It is exemplary of Eckersberg’s oeuvre and a superb example of his mastery of light and shadows created with black ink and delicate gradients of grey wash. Auxiliary and construction lines, and notes on the margins, reveal the academic foundation of the artist's working method; he used measuring instruments and mathematical formulae for his work. Eckersberg was an influential teacher who, from 1818, taught courses on perspective at the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, and published a treaty on the subject in 1841. Born in 1783 in Blåkrog, southern Denmark, Eckersberg is considered the father of ‘Danish Golden Age’ painting, a period of superb artistic production in his home country during the early nineteenth century. After training with Jes Jessen, a painter based in Eckersberg’s home region of Jutland, the artist travelled to Paris. There he worked in the studio of Jacques-Louis David from 1810 to 1813; from the great French Neoclassical artist he learnt the use of modelling through the use of grey wash. Whilst in France, the artist's innovative and highly individual approach to landscape painting began to take shape, also informed by French treatises on the rendering of perspective. His style developed further through a series of plein-air works executed during a sojourn in Florence and Rome. Eckersberg’s fundamental strength as an artist was his impressive handling of light effects, best seen in his seascapes and marine-themed drawings of the 1830s and 40s.

Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers, sale 19 Nov 2008, lot 212, Copenhagen; Daxer and Marschall Gallery, Munich; Private collection, Germany; Agnew's Gallery, Brussels (exhibited at TEFAF March 2025); sold to the Courtauld Institute of Art, 2025.

C.W. Eckersberg, 1783-1853 : artiste danois à Paris, Rome & Copenhague, exh. cat. Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2016
no. 118, p. 317