View of Østerbro from Dosseringen

In Købke's view from Dosseringen, a small woman in white stands alone on a wooden footbridge, looking at a boat drifting past. Both of them were invented. Købke lived in the house whose garden gate opened onto this exact spot on the Sortedam Lake in Copenhagen. He painted the view many times. His study for this canvas shows the same jetty at the same angle, but with no woman, no boat, and the flat blue light of midday. In the finished painting he added both figures and shifted the light to the last hour before sunset. What began as a picture of his own back garden became a picture of departure. Now at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen @smkmuseum