A small paper label preserved inside a Delft faience bust provides the starting point for the story of its former owner, the Danish collector Ole Olsen (1863–1943) (main Image). Dating from the early twentieth century, the label depicts an intriguing figure: a gentleman carefully examining an object through a magnifying glass. A collectors label always reveals part of the history of an object. It establishes ownership, but can also provide the first clue to a much larger story. In this case, the image itself invites a closer look. Instead of a family crest or monogram, Olsen’s label celebrates the act of looking itself.

Whether the gentleman was intended to represent Olsen himself or simply served as an emblem of connoisseurship remains unknown. Either way, the image seems particularly appropriate for a collector whose collection was studied, documented, and eventually described as a historical survey of the ceramic arts.¹ It also invites a closer look at the man behind the Ole Olsen Collection.

Ole Olsen is remembered principally as the founder of Nordisk Film, one of the oldest film studios still in existence (Fig. 1). His path toward becoming one of Denmark’s most successful entrepreneurs, however, was anything but conventional. Born into modest circumstances in rural Denmark, Olsen had severe dyslexia, a condition that was neither recognized nor understood at the time.² As a result, he received very little formal education. His childhood and early adulthood were unsettled. At the age of nine, he had his first encounter with the police after he and several other boys stole a purse. The following year he was sent to a reformatory after repeatedly running away from home. His early adult life was similarly precarious, encompassing numerous occupations, periods of financial difficulty, and further brushes with the law.

Olsen eventually found his calling in popular entertainment. As a musician and showman, and later with his travelling troupe Karavanen, he toured fairs and festivals throughout Scandinavia. By 1896 he had become director of Malmö Tivoli (an amusement park). In 1905, he opened a cinema in Copenhagen, and the following year founded Nordisk Films Kompagni. The company expanded rapidly. By 1908 it had produced around one hundred films, and by 1910 Nordisk Film had become the second-largest film production company in the world, exporting approximately ninety-eight percent of its output. Germany became its largest foreign market, where Olsen acquired approximately thirty-five first-run cinemas.³

The success of Nordisk Film gave Olsen the financial means to build an art collection, but his own account makes clear that money did not create his interest in collecting. “The joy of collecting had been in me since my youth,” he recalled in his autobiography, Filmens Eventyr og mit eget, published in 1940. Shortly after arriving in Copenhagen from the countryside, he spent some of his last money to visit the Moltke painting collection. Only when he later had both money to spare and a permanent home, he wrote, could he begin collecting himself. His first painting was acquired after he became the owner of the cinema in Vimmelskaftet. It depicted a poor, barefoot boy travelling the roads selling mousetraps. “Looking at it made me think of my own life,” Olsen remembered.⁴

The greater part of his private collection was assembled between 1914 and 1930. In the years following the First World War, Olsen travelled south almost every month, attending major auctions in Germany and Austria and becoming familiar with dealers and private owners there. The upheavals of postwar Europe brought important collections onto the market and created unusual opportunities for an ambitious collector.⁵ His departure from Nordisk Film in 1924 marked a further turning point. “From that day,” he wrote, “I was solely a private individual and devoted myself to my art collections.”⁶

By then, collecting had become far more than an investment or pastime. Olsen articulated a remarkably personal philosophy of collecting: “To be a collector, one must have an eye and a feeling for the cultural values of bygone times, and one must be able to live and feel with the person who created the work of art.”⁷

His description of his relationship with individual objects is equally revealing. When he acquired something new, he sometimes kept it in his living room for months, looking at it repeatedly before allowing it to become another number among the approximately 3,500 objects in his collection (Fig 2). “Each speaks its own language, each has its own history,” he wrote, calling the objects his “silent friends.⁸

These recollections give the small figure on Olsen’s collector’s label an unexpected resonance. There is no evidence that the gentleman with the magnifying glass represents Olsen himself, but the image of concentrated observation accords strikingly with Olsen’s own description of how he looked at and lived with his acquisitions.

The scale and scholarly ambition of the collection were already evident in 1924, when the German art historian Hermann Schmitz (1882–1946) published his two-volume catalogue of Olsen’s holdings. Schmitz, a specialist in the decorative arts who had worked at Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum and served as curator at the Schlossmuseum, described the ceramic holdings in terms of a “historical museum of ceramics.”⁹

A similar assessment appears in Olsen’s autobiography, where he reproduced an earlier statement by Otto von Falke, one of the leading museum specialists in the decorative arts of his generation. Von Falke emphasized the collection’s distinctly museum-like character. Its purpose, he argued, was not simply the artistic decoration of Olsen’s home, but the acquisition of outstanding objects from as many of the branches of art represented in public museums as possible.¹⁰ This distinction is important: Olsen was not simply furnishing a wealthy man’s residence. He was attempting to construct a collection in which objects could be understood within a broader history of the decorative arts.

By 1924, Delftware formed a substantial part of Olsen’s ceramic collection. More than forty entries in Schmitz’s catalog were devoted to Delftware, several comprising multiple objects. Later, in his 1940 autobiography, Olsen specifically singled out the Delft faience with grand feu decoration from the second half of the seventeenth century, which he described, on the basis of what he called unanimous assessments, as among the most outstanding works in this part of his collection.¹¹

Schmitz had made a comparable observation in 1924. He noted that few private collections, and indeed only some museums, represented the high points of Delft production during the second half of the seventeenth century so well. His emphasis was therefore not simply on quantity, but on quality.

Several highlights of Olsen’s Delftware collection are illustrated in The Ole Olsen Art Collections. Among them is an impressive three-piece garniture, decorated with lion masks and applied rope ornament.¹² The collection contained works associated with leading Delft factories, including De Paauw (The Peacock), De Roos (The Rose), and De Metaale Pot (The Metal Pot), as well as ambitious forms such as garnitures, ribbed vases, tulip vases, and chargers.

Several Delft objects formerly in the Ole Olsen collection have subsequently passed through Aronson Antiquairs. Among them is an impressive pair of mythological figures representing Diana and Mercury (Fig. 3).¹³ Their sculptural scale, elaborate modeling, and polychrome decoration demonstrate the ambitions of Delft potters beyond the more familiar production of dishes, vases, and functional wares. Objects of this kind also help give material form to the exceptional quality that contemporary descriptions attributed to the Delftware in Olsen’s collection.

Another notable example is the figure of a lady that provided the starting point for this article (Fig. 4). The bust belongs to a small but significant group of figural Delftware sculptures that translate sculptural portrait traditions into tin-glazed earthenware. Delft potters frequently drew inspiration from contemporary prints, sculptural models, and allegorical imagery circulating in Europe, particularly representations of classical goddesses, muses, or personifications of abstract virtues such as Beauty, Abundance, or Harmony. In this case, the generalized features and absence of identifying attributes make a specific portrait identification unlikely.

Olsen’s engagement with his collection extended beyond acquisition. At Stengaarden he had a dedicated top-lit gallery constructed, with large parts of the collection displayed in glass cases. A photograph in his autobiography shows the gallery and, significantly, a vase being restored in the workshop beside it. When war broke out in 1939, Olsen also commissioned a bombproof vault “somewhere in Denmark,” to which approximately eight hundred of his most important objects were transferred in large crates. Although visitors could scarcely tell that anything was missing, Olsen could. He wrote that he would not feel at ease until his “evacuated children” were around him once again.¹⁴

Olsen died in October 1943. His collection did not remain intact. Winkel & Magnussen in Copenhagen subsequently offered works from the Ole Olsen collection in four sales held between January 1944 and May 1953, dispersing objects that had once been brought together at Stengaarden across new private and institutional collections.

The dispersal transformed Olsen’s collection from a single ensemble into thousands of individual object histories. Today, traces of it survive in museums, private collections, auction records, catalogues, and in small physical witnesses such as the label inside the Delft bust. Such evidence allows objects that have long since travelled separate paths to be connected once again with the collection of which they once formed part.

The bust that prompted this research therefore tells more than its own history. Its label leads back to a collector who spent months looking at a new acquisition, who remembered the histories of his objects “better than my own,” and who described them as his silent friends. Nearly a century after Olsen assembled his collection, the objects continue to carry fragments of that relationship with them.

 

NOTES

1. Kai Grunth, Winkel & Magnussen, Kunst i privat eje, vol. I, 1944, pp. 5-6
2. Ole Mortensøn, Ole Olsen – Historiens Aktører nr. 6, Historie-online, December 15, 2020
3. Marguerite Engberg, Ole Olsen – filmproducent, Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, Lex.dk.
4. Ole Olsen, Filmens Eventyr og mit eget, Copenhagen, Jespersen og Pio, 1940, p. 180
5. Ole Olsen, 1940, p. 181
6. Ole Olsen, 1940, p. 157
7. Ole Olsen, 1940, pp. 178–179
8. Ole Olsen, 1940, pp. 179
9. Hermann Schmitz, Generaldirektør Ole Olsens Kunstsamlinger (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1924), p. 1
10. Otto von Falke, as quoted in Olsen, 1940, pp. 176–178, esp. p. 177. Falke describes Olsen’s collecting aim as the acquisition of outstanding objects from, as far as possible, every branch of art represented in public museums.
11. Ole Olsen, 1940, p. 214.
12. Schmitz, 1924, plate XIV, no. 1260
13. Schmitz, 1924, plate XVII, no. 1244
14. Olsen, 1940, p. 194