Emilie Demant Hatt (b. Hansen) was a painter, author and ethnologist from Selde. Her depictions of Lapp life made her a Knight of the Order of Vasa.
Background to Emilie Demant Hatt
Emilie Laurence Demant Hansen was born on January 24, 1873 in Selde. Besides Emilie, there was an older sister Marie Cecilie (b. 2/3 1868).
Emilie Demant’s mother Emma Demant was born in Jyllinge near Odense and her father Frederik Hansen was born in Torslev parish. Her father was apprenticed to merchant Henrichsen at Fur. Later, her father became a merchant in Selde and from 1870 also an innkeeper in Selde. His sister Marie Cecilie Demant later married and moved to Kauslunde on Funen, where she was a teacher. In 1914, the parents also moved to Kauslunde.
Emilie’s schooling was in Selde with teacher H.C. Strandgaard in the school building right next to the grocery store. At the age of 14, Emilie Demant fell in love with the composer Carl Nielsen, a love affair that lasted for three years until Carl Nielsen married another woman.
Painter
Emilie Demant Hansen received her first painting lessons from painter Ida Schiøttz Jensen on Fur. In the beginning, the motifs were the nature around Selde, especially Fursund and the vicarage.
In 1898 -01, Emile Demant Hansen was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts School for Women in Copenhagen. Here she gained drawing skills in perspective, light, interiors and developed a discipline of drawing busts. Emilie Demant used pencil, oil and linocut.
In the winter of 1901-2, she continued her studies of portraiture and nude modeling at a private studio taught by the Funen painter Fritz Syberg. Emilie Demant returned to the Academy’s Art School for Women in 1906 and graduated in 1907.
Emilie Demant Hansen made her debut at the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition as early as 1903, and for several years she had her work hung at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition and the Charlottenborg Autumn Exhibitions.
Emilie Demant Hansen started drawing and painting what she saw; nature and people. But after seeing Harald Giersing’s modernist paintings, she changed her style and began to paint what she remembered. She reproduced her experience of the nature, cities and people she met on her many travels.
In her encounters with European cities, she discovered the contrast between the beautiful and the less beautiful. It was precisely the tension between the beautiful and the unsightly that she painted in her later pictures.
Lapland and the encounter with the Laplander Johan Turi
As a child, Emilie Demant Hansen had read Zacharias Topelius’ fairy tales about the life of the Lapps. Since then, she wanted to meet real Lapps, which she managed to do in 1904 on a trip with her sister. On the journey from Stockholm to Kiruna, Emilie Demant Hansen met the Swedish Lapp Johan Turi by chance. It was a fateful meeting for Emilie as Johan Turi became her path to living among the Lapps. Back in Copenhagen, Emilie Demant Hansen learned Sami and wrote letters with Johan Turi.
Johan Turi wanted to describe the Lapp way of life but was unable to write a book himself. They agreed that Emilie Demant Hansen would return and in 1907 she traveled back to Kiruna to live with the Lapps for a year until 1908. Emilie Demant Hansen experienced first-hand the harsh life of a Lapp family, a life she insisted on being a part of. In 1922, she published the book Ved Ilden (By the Fire ), which she had written after her stay and with knowledge that Johan Turi had passed on to her.
The book attracted a lot of attention and for the first time the living conditions of the mountain lynx were described. This work was recognized by the Nordic Museum in Stockholm in 1940 when she received the Hazelius Medal for outstanding folklife research and later became a Knight of the Order of Vaasa. In 1953 there was an exhibition of Lapland pictures in Stockholm.
the “ethnologist” Emilie Demant Hatt
Emilie Demant Hansen married ethnologist Aage Gudmund Hatt in 1911 at the age of 38. Together they traveled on many journeys such as archaeological expeditions to the West Indies and Greenland. Along the way, Emilie Demant Hatt painted people’s lives and later illustrated Gudmund Hatt’s books. Although Emilie Demant Hatt was not a trained ethnologist, she was one in practice when she spent time with locals. Emilie Demant Hatt also traveled to Russia, America, Holland, Belgium, France and Finland.
After her death in 1958, Emilie Demant Hatt bequeathed her notes and paintings from her notes to the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. In 1966, Skive Art Museum received 15 naturalistic oil paintings and 18 sketchbooks from the estate of Emilie Demant Hatt.
Sources
Jakobsen, K.E. 2014: Emilie Demant Hansen, gift Hatt erindringer fra barndommen i Selde – Fiction og virkelighed.
Skive Museum, 1983: Emilie Demant Hatt 1873-1958 – Leaves for a biography.
Hatt, Emilie Demant, 13/12 1939: Et ensomt folk i Norden. Politikken, chronicle