[Revised 16.07.2026]

Anna Smidth in the manner of Ad Reinhardt’s ’There is just one artist’, Poor Old Tired Horse no. 18, 1965

[https://pallantbookshop.com/product/poor-old-tired-horse-18/]

Material changes. Practice doesn’t.

There is just one signature.

Painting acknowledging the painter.

As responsibility, not individuality. 

There is just one profession.

“Porcelæns-og Oliemaler.”

Porcelain painter.

Oil painter.

Distinctions belong to the museums, collectors, connoisseurs and historians. 

Not to painting.

Painting remains painting.

There is one life.

Biography explains little. Practice explains more.

There is just one history.

The history of artists making it possible for other artists.

Mundt and Luplau made Anna Smidth possible.

Anna Smidth helped make Royal Copenhagen possible.

Royal Copenhagen made another generation possible.

One artist produces another.

There is just one National Trust.

Celebrated names.

Forgotten names.

The difference is historical accident.

The work remains.

To recover her life is not to add another forgotten name to the history of Danish art. It is to understand that art has always been made collectively: through teachers, workshops, institutions, families, apprenticeships, and shared labour.

There is just one artist because there is just one practice.

From hand to hand, from teacher to student, from one generation to the next.

Anna Smidth is practice.

As Heidegger says (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, 1935-1937), “Artist and work are, each in themselves and in their mutual relations, through a third, namely through art, which is the first from which artist and artwork have their name.”

There is just one artist. [Reinhardt]

Anna Smidth is pattern.

Postscript: Anna Smidth (1861-1953) 

Reconstructing her life reminds us that the history of modern art was shaped also by artists whose work was embedded within collaborative institutions and whose achievements have too often remained in the shadows.

There is not one artist but one artistic practice, continuously made and remade by many artists. Individual artists do not originate that practice; they are formed within it even as they transform it. Art is therefore neither individual expression nor anonymous collectivity, but a recursive social process through which making reorganises both the practice and the maker.

Practice is collective before it is personal, and precisely because it is collective, it generates ever more distinct forms of individual expression. [ref: Léger 1913]

The crucial sentence is:

“Si l’on peut mettre en doute une création isolée, la preuve vitale en est faite lorsqu’elle se traduit collectivement dans des moyens d’expression personnelle très distincts.”

Collective practice -> reorganises artistic practice -> reorganises individual painters -> produces new forms of collective practice.

“We are arriving, I am convinced, at a conception of art as vast as the greatest previous eras: the same tendency towards large dimensions, the same effort shared by a community. This last remark deserves further attention. It is important. [. . .] While one might question an isolated creation, its vitality is demonstrated when it is collectively translated into very distinct means of personal expression.”

[trans: Fernand Léger: ‘Les origines de la peinture et sa valeur représentative’ in ‘Fonctions de la Peinture’, Bibliothèque Médiations, Bibliothèque Médiations, 1965]

David Patten, 16.07.2026

Additional Text

Anna Smidth was born on 5 April 1861 at Rønnede Kro, in the parish of Vester Egede, Præstø County. She was the sixth child of Jens Frederik Julius Beck Smidth (1815–1890) and Ane Henriette Høyer (1831–1898), and she had a twin sister, Marie, who later married the land surveyor Edvard Carlsen. Whereas Marie followed the conventional path of marriage and family life, Anna remained unmarried throughout her life, devoting herself to an artistic career. Family records describe her occupation not simply as a porcelain painter but as “Porcelæns- og Oliemaler”—a porcelain and oil painter—a small but significant detail suggesting that she maintained an identity as a painter beyond her work in ceramics.

Her artistic education appears to have been unusually distinguished. According to Danish collectors’ documentation, Anna studied under Emilie Mundt and Marie Luplau, pioneers of women’s artistic education in Denmark. Their private school, established in the 1880s, was founded in response to the Royal Danish Academy’s exclusion of women and became one of the country’s principal training grounds for female artists. If this connection is correct—and it fits well with what we know of her later career—it places Anna among the first generation of professionally trained women artists in Denmark.

From 1885 until 1915, Anna worked at Den Kongelige Porcelainsfabrik (Royal Copenhagen) during the transformative years of Arnold Krog’s artistic directorship. Krog’s reforms elevated porcelain decoration from skilled craft to painterly art, encouraging artists to work directly with underglaze colours in a manner that echoed contemporary easel painting. Anna belonged to the generation that helped establish Royal Copenhagen’s international reputation for refined underglaze decoration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Several surviving pieces bear her signature, indicating that she was not merely an anonymous workshop decorator but one of the painters whose individual contribution was recognised by thefactory. Reviews of exhibitions and surveys of Danish ceramics regularly place her alongside artists such as Marianne Høst, Jenny Meyer, Ingeborg Thorup and Gerhard Heilmann, yet she has never been the subject of a substantial scholarly study. She appears repeatedly in bibliographies and exhibition catalogues, but usually only in passing.

One intriguing aspect of her biography is the contrast between her public invisibility and her apparent professional standing. Contemporary documentation records a thirty-year career at Royal Copenhagen and identifies her as both a porcelain and oil painter, yet little is known about her independent artistic work. It raises the possibility that paintings survive under her name which have never been connected with her career at the porcelain factory.

Anna died in Frederiksberg on 14 March 1953 and was buried five days later at Lindevang Church. The 1953 date corrects the 1951 date that has often been repeated in secondary sources.

Taken together, the fragments suggest that Anna Smidth deserves to be seen not simply as a Royal Copenhagen decorator, but as part of a much larger story: the emergence of professionally educated women artists in Denmark. Her life sits at the intersection of three important developments—the campaign for women’s artistic education led by Emilie Mundt and Marie Luplau, Arnold Krog’s transformation of Royal Copenhagen into an internationally acclaimed artistic institution, and the growing recognition of women as professional artists in their own right.

In many respects, Anna Smidth represents a generation that has slipped between the categories of art history. She was neither celebrated as an independent painter nor remembered as one of the great designers of Danish ceramics. Yet the evidence suggests that she belonged to both worlds. Reconstructing her life reminds us that the history of modern art was shaped not only by its famous names, but also by artists whose work was embedded within collaborative institutions and whose achievements have too often remained in the shadows.