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The Mail Coach in the Summer Night

By Ejner Johansson

The poet Hans Christian Andersen wrote about something he called: Mail Coach Travelling Poetry. The P&T Museum is exhibiting paintings recreating the atmosphere of that age.


The poet Hans Christian Andersen wrote about something he called: Mail Coach Travelling Poetry! In his youth – before the railways – people travelled by mail coaches – horse-drawn stagecoaches with the coachman in red in the driver’s seat.

The mail coach poetry had to do with the expectations and wayside adventures which Andersen associated with the yellow coaches of the postal service: he writes about the atmosphere when it was dark, the lantern had been lit inside the carriage, there was no hurry, life was long! "To travel is to live", as he said.

Danish painters had an eye for the same kind of poetry: Just behold Hans Nikolaj Hansen’s painting of the mail coach in the light summer night – the small thatched houses in front of the sea and the horizon, and he was not the only artist to paint pictures of mail coaches in the night.

The painting is one of many hanging at the Danish Post and Telegraph Museum in Copenhagen. It is, of course, no art museum, but nevertheless there are many good and intriguing pictures. One of the oldest features an old rural post office; it was painted by C. D. Gebauer in 1811. A peaceful travellers' idyll around the thatched inn which also serves as a post office; the travellers are allowed to stretch their legs whilst the coachman fetches water for the horses; they chat with "the locals", and the post rider in the background is blowing the post horn. The scene is shrouded in a yellow evening light; a typical landscape from the early 19th century.

In the countryside where the postmen did not go, they had special parish postmen; Carl Thomsen painted one of these about 150 years ago. They were old men who were no longer able to work so they went errands to the market town instead and brought back the mail for the peasants.

Postmen and Ship’s Portaits
Frederik Vermehren’s Copenhagen postman from 1909 is quite impressive: a magnificent character painting of a stout man in his old, red uniform and with his cap jauntily askew.

The now famous and expensive Poul Fischer has also painted a Copenhagen motif; a nice cloudy weather study painted on a winter’s day around 1920; it features the Central Post Building in Tietgensgade. By collecting paintings of post offices and the like the museum has secured many interesting, topographic pictures from all over Denmark.

Even for lovers of "ship’s portraits" there is something to find in the museum: naïve paintings of magnificent vessels of the past; e.g. the well-known ship’s marine painter Jacob Petersen’s picture from 1845 of "Frederick VI" , the first Danish-built steamship which sailed between Copenhagen and Kiel. Hans Christian Andersen went by this ship on his first great trip to Italy; it was also part of the mail coach travelling poetry.



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