The son of a merchant, the marine painter Viggo Fauerholdt studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (the Kunstakadamiet) in Copenhagen between 1846 and 1852. He exhibited regularly at the Kunstakadamiet between 1854 and 1867, showing a total of forty-two works, and in 1857 won the Neuhausen Prize. Fauerholdt travelled widely throughout Denmark, painting in and around Copenhagen and also at Helsingør, Sønderbog, Rudkøbing, Svendborg and on the island of Fanø. Many of his exhibited works from 1856 onwards were views of the rugged coastline of the Danish island of Bornholm, situated in the Baltic Sea well to the east of the rest of Denmark, and midway between the south coast of Sweden and the northern coasts of Germany and Poland. Inspired by the contemporary Germanic tradition of picturesque landscape painting, Fauerholdt was one of the first Danish artists to paint the dramatic coastline of Bornholm, and must have lived on the island for several years. In 1862 one of his views of Bornholm was acquired by King Frederik VII of Denmark. Three years later, in 1865, Fauerholdt left Denmark and settled in Düsseldorf, where he lived and worked until his death. For the remainder of his career he painted coastal and shipping scenes and seascapes, mainly in Germany and Holland.

Dated 1857, this small oil sketch is a view of the coastal rock formation of Randkløve Skår on the east coast of the Baltic island of Bornholm. Located southeast of the town and fishing port of Gudhjem, which Fauerholdt painted often, Randkløve Skår is a natural cleft or ravine in the rock cliff face, shaped by the movements of ice over millions of years. As the author of a 19th century American guidebook noted, ‘The scenery and geological nature of Bornholm differ so essentially from the other parts of Denmark – wild coasts, and picturesque rocks but a few hundred feet above sea-level…A walk should be taken to a wild spot on the coast – Randklöveskaaret, east of Österlarsker...’1 The precise location of this coastal view can be determined as a little north of the small fishing village of Ypnasted. Today the coastline at Randkløve Skår is much less barren than it appears in this oil sketch, since sheep are no longer grazed on the cliffs and the landscape is now heavily overgrown with vegetation.

The present sheet is a study for the left edge of one of Fauerholdt’s best-known early paintings; a much larger and more panoramic view of Randkløve Skår and the east coast of Bornholm, also dated 1857, that is today in the collection of the Bornholms Konstmuseum2. The painting, which was probably exhibited in 1858 at the Kunstakadamiet in the Charlottenborg Palace in Copenhagen, was acquired by the museum on Bornholm in 1985. Another painting of the coast of Bornholm by Fauerholdt is in the collection of the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum (the German Maritime Museum) in Bremerhaven.

The mount of this oil sketch bears the drystamp of the 19th century Danish collector Benjamin Wolff (1790-1866). Wolff studied law in Copenhagen before settling in Calcutta, where for twelve years he worked for an English trading house, of which he eventually became a partner. Wolff returned to Denmark a wealthy man in 1829, and the following year purchased the large manor home and estate of Engelholm, about sixty kilometres southwest of Copenhagen. An amateur draughtsman himself, Wolff assembled a collection of drawings by Danish and European artists ranging in date from the 16th century to the 19th century. Over the course of some thirty years, he acquired over 2,000 drawings, most of which were purchased at auctions in Denmark. Following Wolff’s death in 1866, the collection remained with his descendants for over 150 years. Apart from a modest bequest to the Statens Museum for Konst in Copenhagen in 1915 and two small exhibitions in a town in Denmark in the early 1980s, Wolff’s collection of drawings remained little known to the public at large.


1. William Pembroke Fetridge, Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Europe and the East, New York, 1883, Vol.III, pp.1346-1347.

2. Henrik Vensild, ‘Viggo Fauerholdt – en maler på Bornholm i forrige århundrede’, Jul paa Bornholm, 1985, illustrated p.34. An image of the painting, which measures 56 x 92 cm., is visible at https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/randcleven-at-gudhjem-on-the-eastcoast-of-bornholm/XQHvaKoSYItqgg [accessed 15 October 2022].