A Broholmer Dog Looking at a Stag Beetle by Otto Bache was created in 1871. The painting is in Nivågård’s Malerisamling. The size of the work is 82 x 112 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.
Otto Bache possessed an incredible knack for observation and insight when painting animals. In this detailed animal study of a Broholmer dog, everything from the saggy skin around its neck to the powerful musculature in its legs has been depicted with painstaking care. Crawling along the ground is a stag beetle, which the dog examines inquisitively. The background is dominated by dark colours while an intense frontal light illuminates the folds in the dog’s skin and its muscular anatomy. This is a pre-study to the painting After the boar hunt from 1876 (National Gallery of Denmark), in which a number of hunting dogs and a hunter are depicted around a felled boar… (read more in Nivågård’s Malerisamling)
About the Artist: Danish Realist painter Otto Bache was born in Roskilde. At age eleven he received a dispensation and was admitted into the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1856 he received his first silver medal from the Academy and the following year he was awarded a second. Subsequently, he won the Neuhausen Prize for his painting “Husdyr i en Bondegaard”. In 1866, he received the Academy’s travel grant and went to Paris and later to Italy… Read more
