Albert Küchler

Albert Küchler (Copenhagen, 1803 – Rome, 1886), also known as Peter of Copenhagen, was a Danish painter associated with the Danish Golden Age. He mainly painted genre scenes and portraits. Highly esteemed by his contemporaries, he is little known today. His career also shows a major turn: a secular artist in his youth, he later became a friar and spent his final decades in a monastery in Rome.

The son of a cabinet maker, Küchler wanted to become a painter despite his father's initial disapproval. He entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1816 and studied under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, as did most of his generation. The German Nazarene movement and its artistic ideas also mattered to him. In 1829 he won the Academy's great gold medal, which came with a travel scholarship. In 1830 he settled in Rome, where he became a popular member of the community of Danish artists. He appears in several well-known group paintings of the period, including works by Constantin Hansen and Ditlev Blunck, both from 1837.

In Rome he painted the colourful everyday life of the local people. He was a close friend of the poet Christian Winther, for whom he painted The Albanian Girl (1831). He also portrayed Hans Christian Andersen during Andersen's first visit to Rome, from 1833 to 1834. His early work already contains religious references, as in Correggio's Death (1834), which took its immediate inspiration from a tragedy by Adam Oehlenschläger but was reinterpreted with clear religious meaning.

Küchler converted to Roman Catholicism in 1844, a change that surprised and in part troubled his friends. In 1851 he joined the Franciscan order as a Friar Minor under the name Peter of Copenhagen. After three years at St. Joseph Church in Prudnik, he settled at the St. Bonaventure Monastery on the Palatine Hill in Rome, where he lived until his death. The Pope allowed him to continue painting from the monastery and commissioned several works. From then on his output was exclusively religious, including altarpieces and copies of older paintings. Some of these works can still be seen in Danish churches, such as those in Ballerup, Esbønderup and Toreby.

In 1877 he was made a member of the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and received a pension from Denmark. While living at the monastery he received visitors from home, including members of the royal family, painters and writers. He appears as a character in several novels and in a number of poems of the Danish Golden Age. More recently, the Chinese artist Liu Ye made a portrait of Andersen based on Küchler's 1834 portrait, and Küchler's painting of Winther's girlfriend prompted a debate in Albanian media between 2004 and 2006 about her origins.