COPENHAGEN.-Presenting rarely-seen drawings and paintings, the two summer exhibitions at Statens Museum for Kunst poignantly illustrate the overall developments within Danish art from the works of the early Danish Golden Age in the 19th century to the dawning of Modernism. The two exhibitions Danish Drawings from Paris and Danish Paintings from Finland put forward two important collections of Danish art which, housed as they are on foreign soil, have never before been exhibited together in their original creators' native Denmark.

Danish Drawings from Paris - The exhibition presents a unique collection of drawings by Danish masters; a gathering of works which forms part of the Frits Lugt Collection at the Institute N�erlandais in Paris. Since the 1970s, the Frits Lugt Collection has collected drawings by the finest Danish artists of the 19th century. Acting on the advice of the legendary head of the Royal Department of Prints and Drawings at Statens Museum for Kunst, Erik Fischer, the then-director of the Frits Lugt Collection, Carlos van Hasselt, systematically purchased Danish drawings with a view to illustrating a clear line of development within Danish drawing from its Golden Age onwards.

Through a select group of 75 important drawings, the exhibition elucidates the pivotal acme of Danish art from the late 18th century up through the 19th century. From Abildgaard and Jens Juel through Eckersberg, K�bke, Lundbye, and R�rbye and onwards to artists such as Philipsen and Hammersh�i, poised on the threshold of the modern. The many works range from preliminary studies, which provide an intimate glimpse into the artists' deliberations and working processes, to drawings whose compositions and details clearly show they were intended as finished works in their own right.

The exhibition was shown earlier this year at the Danish House in Paris and will subsequently travel to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Danish Paintings from Finland - This summer's exhibition of paintings presents Hans Tobiesen's collection of Danish art from the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki. Tobiesen (1881-1953), a shipping magnate, owned a collection comprising more 400 works, 14 of which he bequeathed to the museum in Finland.

All 14 paintings are included in the exhibition, which not only establishes a portrait of a keen collector with a sharply-honed sense for the most interesting examples of groundbreaking artistic efforts – it also provides a condensed view of more than a century of Danish art. From C.W. Eckersberg's detailed Romantic studies of nature through the works of his gifted students Christen K�bke, J.T. Lundbye, and Constantin Hansen onwards to the advent of Naturalism and Impressionism ushered in by figures such as L.A. Ring and Theodor Philipsen.