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Out to see – before DSB

By Dorte Fogh

Until the railways were built 150 years ago, the Danish postal service was in charge of conveyance of as well mail as passengers. On the occasion of the jubilee MuseumsPosten would like to tell its readers how journeys were made once upon a time.


"When somebody has made a journey, he is able to tell something. But if anybody cares to listen, is a different matter," an old adage says. We are, however, eager to pay attention, when the traveller is an enthusiastic narrator like the painter Rasmus Christiansen (1863-1940). In 1938, at the request of the Post & Telegraph Museum, he depicted the journey between Copenhagen and Hamburg in a series of diverting pictures. The series shows how the journey might be made by different means of transport in the good old days.

It is obvious that he regarded the time of the stagecoaches positively because his portrayal of the trip is festive and picturesque. His canvases recount poetically and lively about the departure from Copenhagen through the town gate and some of the many breaks along the way when horses were to be changed. In order to lend variety to his pictures Rasmus Christiansen to depict situations from the eventful journey during different seasons and at different places on the route. Everywhere there is a riot of people dressed in the colourful costumes of that age, and the red and yellow colours of the postal service light up the landscape cheerfully.

But one thing is how you might imagine the good old days during the first half of the 20th century; another thing was to feel for yourself what it was like. Hans Christian Andersen, who is known to have loved to travel, had made the journey from Copenhagen to Hamburg by stagecoach as well as by the modern train. He had a totally different view on the matter and wrote in 1866 in one of his many accounts of a journey: "When the railways were opened in Europe, yells were heard that now the old, fine way of travelling was over; the poetry of travelling had disappeared, the magic was lost".

On his own behalf he ascertained that he was "not poetic enough to be happy with the old days". He considered the stagecoaches "crates of torture; big, heavy omnibuses with entrance only on one side so that you could not escape when it overturned on that side – and it always overturned".

Historical Paintings and Object Pictures

You may judge for yourself whether it is the poet Hans Christian Andersen or the painter Rasmus Christiansen who is right in their conception of the journey. Under all circumstances there is more to the story. Since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, artists were primarily supposed to illustrate myths of gods and glorify heroes of the past. But at the end of the 19th century this kind of historical painting lost ground among modern artists who were more absorbed in their own time.

Nevertheless, graphic presentations of the past were the height of fashion in the museum world when the Post and Telegraph Museum ordered the series The Danish Agricultural Museum got a very popular series about the history of agriculture. There is no doubt that both guides and the public have enjoyed these pictures. It is evident that Rasmus Christiansen has learned from the apparently coincidental cuttings that photographers make in what he called his "industrial painting" – even if he did it with some maladroitness. He painted what he was asked to paint, but his pictures were not always that successful from an artistic point of view e.g. what concerned choice of colours and shading. Nor are all the historical details correct. A post rider did e.g. not carry a sable as late as in 1845.

Today most school teachers and museum guides prefer to show their audience the real things. If that is not possible, many of them choose to appeal to the spectators’ own imagination. You may be surprised to learn that the most important route between Copenhagen and Hamburg were not paved until late 18th - early 19th century. Imagine jolting and bouncing across paving stones for a whole week in what Hans Christian Andersen describes as a crate of torture. Now the journey can be made in only five hours by the Danish State Railways.



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