GIFT BOOKS : A Peaceable Kingdom : THE GOLDEN AGE OF DANISH PAINTING <i> (Hudson Hills Press / Los Angeles County Museum of Art: $65 cloth, $35 paper)</i>

Serene and luminous, pictures from “The Golden Age of Danish Painting”--the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Jan. 2, then at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Feb. 13-April 24--beguile the viewer the way many aspects of Denmark do. The initial presentation is mild, simply pleasant; the heart is won slowly, almost inexplicably, but forever.

The handsome catalogue suits this process; with it, one can consider the pictures in the tranquility that best complements them and learn in detail about the particular world they reflect. The volume offers a quartet of informative, sometimes thought-provoking essays, among them work by Philip Conisbee and Kasper Monrad, two of the exhibit’s organizers; Monrad’s brief biographies of the individual artists and his exhaustive notes on the 105 pictures in the show, much of this material an expansion of his work for the 1984 “Danish Painting: The Golden Age” (the catalogue for the only other such traveling show); and better-than-tolerable reproductions in color of every last entry.

As the text relates, the first half of the 19th Century (the Golden Age is clocked in as extending from 1815 to 1848) was a period when the fine arts in Denmark came fully into their own, in tandem with a general flowering in the culture. Though the pictures seem to emanate from a peaceable kingdom, the era was, historically and socially, a turbulent time for the little land, wracked and impoverished after the Napoleonic wars, then threatened by separatist rumblings in its German duchies, and under the stress of shifting from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy.

Within Copenhagen’s ramparts, a distinctive school of art was developing. Its founding is credited to Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853), who--without himself wholly abandoning the tenets of ideal beauty and proportion he inherited from the classical model--guided his many gifted pupils along the path leading toward a greater naturalism or realism: the wonders of the commonplace. He urged them to focus their energy on looking and recording, no doubt under the assumption that “significance” would take care of itself.

Eckersberg’s followers, responsive to his teaching as a group, evolved each in his own way. Wilhelm Bendz (1804-1832) took Eckersberg’s obsession with perspective and made of it a cabalistic sort of device that contributes to the mystery underlying his pictures. Christian Kobke (1810-1848), universally found to be the most accomplished, spontaneous and irresistible of the Golden Age painters, rendered familiar local scenes and the faces of friends and family with a joy in the world’s sensuous beauty that is at once temperate and unquenchable. A group of landscape specialists--animated by Denmark’s growing nationalistic fervor--took as their mentor the more emotively inclined Johan Ludvig Lund. Still, all of these artists formed a cohesive group--a band of aesthetic cousins, as it were--depicting a Denmark that, physically and in its ethos, is still recognizable.

Their art has been less widely appreciated than it deserves partly because of its quietness--characteristically, it avoids grandness of scale, of subject matter, of technical display--and partly because it lacked international exposure. Denmark is a small country with (at least in modern times) a near pathological aversion to putting itself forward. The Golden Age produced geniuses in several branches of high culture, but only philosopher Soren Kirkegaard and the writer Hans Christian Andersen enjoyed international fame in their own day.

It’s important to remember that, despite its potential international appeal, Golden Age painting remains--blessedly, I’d argue--a local phenomenon. It is entirely Danish, embodying national characteristics that had begun to evolve centuries earlier and that persist today. Information and inspiration acquired abroad were immediately domesticated. The virtues we find in this school are specific to the breed, at times unrelated--even contrary--to the standards by which we customarily judge art. For instance, there’s no question that, as a group, these Danish painters were less technically adept than, say, their French peers. Yet often the Danes’ work attains the peculiar grace that comes to an artist when his skills aren’t quite adequate to his realizing his vision. In the gap between desire and actualization we can read the sincere intent and earnest effort that in turn suggest moral purity.

Modesty is a primary characteristic of these pictures, whether they be portraits, landscapes, architectural or genre studies. They concern themselves with the ordinary and the particular, closely and truthfully observed, as opposed to the generic, exalted; their ideal is bourgeois, not aristocratic. Typically, these works are small enough to fit comfortably into a parlor; they don’t aspire to the salon or the museum. Eckersberg urged upon his proteges the notion that no subject was too insignificant for the artist’s concern. In this, he echoed the Danish penchant for the unpretentious and activated the Danish gift for achieving radiance within modest dimensions--of space, of materials, of behavior.

The fresh faces in the portraits gaze out at the viewer with gentle, unassuming frankness, as if the subjects were spontaneously offering you their being, vulnerable and unadorned. Devoid of ostentation and guile, these are the very faces you encounter today in Copenhagen’s streets and shops. To the contemporary urban foreigner accustomed to meeting people who defend or falsify their identity with a variety of impenetrable masks, the charm of this self-revelation is fairly irresistible.

With the architectural renderings they executed on study tours to Italy and Greece as well as on their native turf, and in their landscapes, the Golden Age painters scrutinized the scene before them with the same keen and tender simplicity that their portrait subjects display in contemplating the observer. In their open-air painting--a practice then new to Denmark--these artists represent their subject unveiled, suffusing it with a loving sense of place and a deep sense of peace. Gradually, in the latter part of the period, Danish landscape painting moved away from scrupulous realism toward the self-dramatizing attitudes of Romantic art. Even then, it retained its loyalty to conveying a personal experience of the actual and to creating an atmosphere governed by harmony and reticence.

Light--more than subject matter, mind-set, drawing or brush technique--seems to be the main conduit for what is happening in the painting of the Danish Golden Age. Lying as it does in a northern latitude, Denmark has learned the value of light through its frequent absence. The quality of its light is breathtaking, falling like a blessing upon everything it illuminates. The Golden Age painters represent their light as uncompromising yet gentle, the essential tool for clear examination--which reveals only benign discoveries. It is also reflected as a kind of glow from within, like the candlelight ever present in Danish homes, a reminder and promise of warmth.

Color, light’s partner, is delicate in the Danish pictures, often muted by gray tones or manifested as a fresh, clear spectrum of pastels. The harmony of color in the Danish pictures--which works as a metaphor for calm contentment--relates to the local climate. Danish weather is typically wet and misty, lending even the lushest, most intensely hued greenery a protective haze. It’s instructive to emerge from one of the Danish museums and see that the palette manipulated so exquisitely in the pictures you’ve just seen is not a fanciful creation of the Golden Age artists or a mannerism imitated among them but the beautiful actuality that inspired them.