File:Agnes Slott-Møller - The Dying Betrothed.jpg

Excerpt from the lot essay: "The Dying Betrothed depicts a scene from a Danish folk song Liden Kirsten. It portrays the moment when Liden Kirsten finds her Betrothed dying. Overcome with grief, she kisses the hand of her love tenderly as he pushes his treasures towards her, forsaking his mother's wish that he think first of his brothers and sisters. Like Carpaccio's funeral image, the picture is cleverly divided into two. On the right we see what looks like a balcony strewn with small branches of fir, as is the custom in Danish funerals. Beyond the balcony is a ship sailing into the distance, its sail becoming ghostly as it merges with the colour of the sky. This is most probably the ship of death waiting to take her betrothed away.

What Slott-Møller has achieved which perhaps Carpaccio has not, is the real poignancy of the image. The way in which she has compressed the image, for example, so that the sadness of the figure seen on the left is heightened in this limited space. The solid divide between the girl with her betrothed and the ship also emphasises the gulf between this world and the next.

The Dying Betrothed was painted in 1906 and was exhibited at the Charlottenborg Spring exhibition in the same year. Agnes Slott-Møller was subsequently awarded the Eckersberg medallion by the Royal Academy. This was a well-deserved award for a hauntingly beautiful image."