Rediscovering Denmark’s Golden Age : Farewell exhibition of former L.A. County Museum curator Philip Conisbee is a small jewel of a show.

With the exception of critic Sanford Schwartz, who has lately become a one-man rescue squad for resuscitating the reputation of the radiantly incisive artist Christen Kobke, Danish painting of the early 19th Century has never had much in the way of critical support--or even serious regard--in the United States. It’s a blank spot in our historical memory.

The simple vicissitudes of history are part of the reason why. By 1800, the radical propositions of the Enlightenment, as well as the beginning waves of political and industrial revolution, had conspired to create dozens of pockets of extraordinary cultural ferment across Europe. Copenhagen was one of those pockets. Its Royal Academy even attracted students of the caliber of Hamburg’s Philip Otto Runge and, most notably, Dresden’s great visual poet of the mysteriously exalted, moonlit landscape, Caspar David Friedrich.

And then, along came France. Things were going quite nicely in Copenhagen, thank you, when suddenly a wide blast of French artistic brilliance fairly blew little Denmark--and most everywhere else--off the map for the century’s second half. The work of Kobke and of other lovely painters, such as Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and Johan Thomas Lundbye, disappeared into musty closets of avant-garde indifference.

Now, they’re back. While greatly admired in their home nation from the start, Danish painters at work during the three decades between Eckersberg’s influential 1816 return to Copenhagen from a study tour to Rome and the 1848 overthrow of the absolute monarchy have recently been emerging from the shadows. This insular little nation by the sea is finally being rediscovered by the great project of art historical revisionism that began in the 1960s.

On Sunday, “The Golden Age of Danish Painting” had its debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (It travels to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in February.) The farewell exhibition of former LACMA curator Philip Conisbee, it has been admirably co-organized by the Met’s Gary Tinterow and by Kasper Monrad, curator at the State Art Museum in Copenhagen, which is the principal lender to this small jewel of a show.

Rather loose chronology and thematic groupings have been harnessed to tell the story of Danish painting in this fecund period, with five, differently colored galleries arranged like coherent scenes in a narrative, or sequential chapters in a book. A terrific job of curatorial organization, it speaks of a thorough, intimate familiarity with the efflorescence (my guess is Monrad’s was an important guiding hand; he contributed all the entries to the generally fine catalogue).

The exhibition’s curatorial story features 105 paintings, and works by 17 artists make appearances. Three keep stealing the limelight, however, either through the sheer abundance of examples, the compelling quality of their work, or both. Nearly half the show is rightly devoted to Eckersberg and Kobke, with 23 paintings each, while nine are by Lundbye.

The gallery narrative goes like this. First is a room of portraits of artists in their studios, as well as a few examples of their then-standard, Neoclassical preoccupation with mythological images. The scene is set.

Greece and Rome, gods and goddesses immediately vanish without a trace in gallery two. They’re replaced by crisp portraits of prosperous, contemporary families, either formally posed or engaged in domestic activities--knitting, playing, looking at engravings, tending pets. It’s the “Family Values” room.

The third gallery articulates “The Lure of Italy” in assorted picturesque views of Rome, the Campagna and other Italian sites (with a few side trips to Greece). These carefully crafted, Neoclassically composed pictures of houses glimpsed through the ruins of the Colosseum or of a vegetable market spread out in the square before an imposing church on the edge of Palermo Harbor are a kind of melding of the first two galleries. Their subject is contemporary life, but in settings that resonate with the ancientness and continuity of Western civilization and its classical past.

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Gallery four--the largest--surveys the emergence of a full-fledged “Copenhagen School,” which might be said to represent the flowering of lessons internalized from preceding rooms. Here, it is contemporary Denmark and the dialectic of its relationship with its own past that is front and center, exquisitely observed in all its variety and imbued with a crystalline light.

Finally, the last gallery is devoted to landscape painting. The preeminent 19th-Century European and North American subject, landscape painting was a logical step. Artists enfolded into the very soil a sense of continuity with the past, an encounter with the present and a promise of the future.

Lundbye’s “Zealand Landscape: Open Country in North Zealand” (1842) is the most dazzling journey through a rural landscape. Visually, you step into the picture by way of a dirt road that opens along the bottom edge of the sizable canvas. A veritable jungle of precise, almost excruciatingly described vegetation dominates the roadside foreground, in order to seduce your eye.

Once entangled, you set out on the roadway over lazily rolling hills in the middle ground to a grove of gently swaying trees on the low horizon--and then up, gently lofted into the vast, melting blue sky of a golden afternoon on a wispy trail of creamy clouds. A more heavenly rendition of a wholly secular landscape is hard to conceive.

Landscape painting was the hallmark of a new age of nationalism, and most every painting in this section compositionally invites you into its world for a stroll down a country lane, or out onto a wooden bridge or boat landing, or into a grassy field. One pleasure of the show is the frequent pairing of oil sketches with finished pictures: Lundbye cobbled together his romantically idealized vision from on-site sketches and his own imagination.

Although some pivotal works were not lent--Kobke’s important “View of a Street in a Copenhagen Suburb, Morning Light” (1836) and Lundbye’s monumental “A Danish Coast” (1843) among them--there is certainly enough here to make a fan out of hitherto indifferent visitors. Denmark’s “Golden Age” gave us Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, but it plainly gave us several estimable painters, too.