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User Text: Søren Emil Carlsen, called Emil by his friends, was a skilled painter of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. While his kitchen still lifes of kettles and game were darkly reminiscent of 18th-century French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, his portraits and landscapes were filled with the brushwork of impressionism, the subdued color harmonies of the Tonalists, and an ethereal light. In his woodland interior and marine scenes, he achieved contrasting effects through a laborious process of applying paint with a dry brush, scraping his pigment, and leaving areas of the canvas bare.
Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, Carlsen studied architecture at the Danish Royal Academy. He immigrated to Chicago in 1872, where he worked as an architectural draftsman and as an assistant to Danish painter Laurits Holst; he also became an art teacher at the newly formed Art Institute of Chicago. In 1875, he went to Paris, where he studied the work of the old masters. Upon his return, he settled in Boston.
Carlsen returned to Paris in 1884, attended classes at the Académie Julian, and exhibited in the 1885 Paris Salon. In 1887, he moved to San Francisco for four years to serve as Director of the California School of Design. He also taught at the San Francisco Art Students’ League with Mary Curtis Richardson and Arthur Mathews. In the East, he taught at the National Academy of Design in New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia. In 1905, he purchased a summer home in Connecticut, from which he painted the regional landscape.