Sad days in Copenhagen

An unlucky episode in the life of this biographer

Oct 04, 2023

The following piece is an edited excerpt from my first book, Nelly Erichsen: A Hidden Life. For those of you who don’t know the wonderful Nelly, she was an Anglo-Danish artist, born to Danish parents in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1862. She trained at the Royal Academy in London, where she was a very successful student, winning prizes and showing her work at the Summer Exhibition on many occasions. Later in life she became self-supporting, but only just, as a translator and illustrator working for Macmillan and Dent. From 1912 she lived in Tuscany, where she died in 1918 of Spanish flu contracted while she was working with refugees. I have attached some of Nelly’s drawings which we did eventually track down. So much more is lost.

Not long after I started researching Nelly’s Danish roots, more than a decade ago, I stumbled upon an internet treasure trove. It was hard to dig out much about Nelly beyond the public record of her dates, her qualifications and published works. Here was what I had been hoping to find. The Suhr Foundation, endowed by Nelly’s mother’s wealthy relations and housed in grand offices in Copenhagen, had been gathering and preserving family archives since its creation in 1859. In the 1980s it started to catalogue the Suhr family tree and every descendant was allotted a specific number and entered into the Family Book. Nelly, the daughter of Anna Suhr, was K38. Every year a newsletter, ‘the Yellow Booklet’ was sent to family members. At some point a rather primitive website was created and a great deal of effort must have been put into loading up the newsletters, all in Danish of course. But with a bit of Google Translate I could see that the Foundation had in its possession a major collection of Nelly’s letters and scrapbooks, more than I had ever been able to find anywhere else.

So, what was on the website? A fascinating opportunity to fill in the gaps. In 1983 an architect called Henrik Reimann donated archives which were described in the newsletter as ‘among the most interesting the Foundation ever received.’ Henrik was the grandson of Nelly’s sister Dora, and he handed over nearly a hundred letters written by Nelly to her mother during her visits to Denmark between 1880 and 1898, as well as her diaries and sketchbooks. These contained descriptions of the older Suhr generation, their homes, their lives and life in 19th century Denmark. There were sketches of the various family estates: Solyst, Rosengaard and Kvaekebyegnen. There were also notes that Nelly had taken as dictation from her mother, who was losing her eyesight, being recollections of life at Solyst when she was young. The archive also contained letters Nelly had written to Nordic authors including Pontoppidan, whose work she would later illustrate. It would have been a fantastic resource, holding the answers to so many questions I had about Nelly.

Nelly’s first trip, described in eight letters, took place over three months in the summer of 1880 - she was only 17, this must have been a brave expedition if she did it alone. The website explained that ‘all her visits and experiences were delightfully observed and described’. More letters followed in 1888 and 1889, over eighty in all as she did a complete tour of her relatives. This must have been when the photograph of Nelly (see above) was taken. These letters were illustrated with little drawings – the website even reproduced an example, a small sketch of children playing with a baby pram by a church, dated 1880.

We asked a Danish friend to translate some of the website material: ‘In the morning I went down into the countryside and sketched some cottages...I encountered some children sitting in a little cart, unwilling at first when I asked if I could draw them. One little fellow, Frederick Ohlsen, said ‘No it will surely cost some money’. After that however he became the most forward of the children, collecting others of all sorts and forcing them to stand in the most military positions, as my sketchbook will testify.’

There was also a sketchbook titled ‘Round about Rosengaard’ full of drawings of the big farm and the nearby village, houses, churches, and characters such as ‘Emil the Postwoman’, ‘The Poacher’s Daughter’, ‘Hunters ready to shoot’, ‘the gravediggers’ and many more. Some of these pictures could be directly traced by the Suhr archivist into Nelly’s later book illustrations, for example her work on The Promised Land by Pontoppidan. Her Danish roots were becoming a major source of inspiration for her work.

The bundle of letters and drawings apparently also contained portraits of many family members and friends such as the actress Johanne Louise Heiberg and Mette Gad, Paul Gauguin’s Danish wife. Nelly had bought a painting by Gauguin in 1888, which can now be seen hanging in the National Gallery in Copenhagen, donated by her in 1912. Mette and her three children had returned to live with her family in Copenhagen after her marriage to Gauguin failed. Maybe Nelly bought the painting as a way of helping the abandoned woman.

The article on the website concluded with the news that someone (unidentified) was going to prepare a private publication on Nelly and her works, and a plea went out to relatives living in the UK and US to send more material. The plea was answered by a gentleman called Jasper Rootham, grandson of Alice Lucas, Nelly’s sister, then living in Dorset. In 1986 the archivist visited Jasper at his home and took possession of another sizeable cache of Nelly’s letters to be deposited at the Foundation. This included over 60 letters written by Nelly to her sister from France, Italy and Switzerland in the years 1892-1906, including several on the subject of their young brother Charles’ early death in Nagasaki.

Five years later the Reimann family produced more goods for the Foundation’s archive, all listed on the website – ten photographs of Nelly’s original work - two paintings, original illustrations from the Highways and Byways series and an illustration for The Emperor’s New Clothes. This was fascinating to me – when her sister Alice published a translation of the tales of Hans Christian Anderson in the 1890s, Nelly did not have the commission to do the illustrations. So had she started the project but lost out, or failed to deliver?

The following year the website noted that the papers of Miss Ida Suhr, Nelly’s wealthy cousin, had been deposited at the Foundation. As well as numerous letters relating to OB Suhr and his business connections, and a large collection of Ida’s correspondence with the literary great and the good of Denmark, there were 40 letters from and about Nelly dating from 1906 to 1918, including 14 very long letters written to Ida by Nelly from Italy, and other letters from her friends in Italy including Janet Ross, who continued writing to Ida from 1911 until 1923. We know from Janet’s correspondence that Ida helped Nelly financially in her later years; these letters, which were probably in English, must have explained how and why this came about.

So with this trove of information, it is not surprising that Peter and I planned a trip to Copenhagen in 2012. I had started emailing the Foundation two years earlier asking for information about the photographs on the website, and had been sent a pdf of the pages I could already see, and an email saying that they did not have any other material. Very strange, I thought. I tried again using the help of a family member with a password for the website. Yet again he and I were told that there was nothing to see. It was explained that this was ‘in part due to The Suhrske Foundation [having] now rented out all rooms in the building except for two. This required a further reduction of stored family material. The only place we now have written family material is on www.suhrske.com’.

It didn’t seem to me to be possible that they could have lost or disposed of the physical archive. The Suhr family were major players in the commercial life of nineteenth century Denmark: the family were well-connected socially, supporters of cultural activity and benefactors of the poor. Social historians of nineteenth century Denmark would have been delighted to see this material. I emailed the Danish National Archive to see if the collection had been transferred there for safekeeping but they had no idea what I was talking about. We packed our bags and went to Copenhagen. At first things went well, the sun was shining and the hotel we were staying in turned out to be a converted Suhr warehouse on the waterfront.

undefined — The Suhr Building in Gammeltorv, Copenhagen

We had arranged an appointment with the Guardian of the Suhr Foundation, and the morning after we arrived we searched out the old Suhr offices in Gammeltorv, a square that still looks medieval in places, and rang the bell. No-one answered. But then our guide from the Foundation arrived, who looked as mystified to see us in the flesh as he had sounded in our email exchanges, and with a lot of headshaking and sighing, he with as little English as our Danish, he unlocked the doors. And we were shown round the completely empty rooms in the beautiful old building that had once been the head office of the Suhr trading empire. Everything had indeed been cleared out, apart from one or two dusty 18th century portraits on the walls. Disbelieving, I pulled open empty drawers and looked in empty cupboards. Nothing. The poor gentleman who was showing us round had been the guardian of the Foundation when the building had been cleared. He was clearly unwell and unhappy. He told me that some papers had been bundled up and sent on to the agricultural offices of the Foundation out at a place called Bonderup. When we got home I emailed Bonderup. They said they had nothing at all answering to the descriptions I was giving them.

Bonderup | lex.dk – Den Store Danske — The Suhr Foundation’s offices in Bonderup

A couple of years later and after a great deal of persistence on the part of two enthusiastic Erichsen relations, we were invited to Bonderup. We were welcomed warmly and shown up to the attic of the old farm offices and invited to rummage through dusty shelves and folders. We found some things: but sadly, much remains lost, and there had been no attempt to sort or preserve the papers. There was no sign of Nelly’s early letters to her mother, or any diaries or sketchbooks. We did find some treasures: a bundle of letters from Hermann Erichsen to his daughter, written just the year before he died, which were full of warmth, humour and affection. We found a package of letters written home by Nelly’s younger brother Charles as he travelled to Japan, aged just 18. There were a few of the letters Nelly had sent to her mother from her travels in Italy and Switzerland. A peep into the life she lived as a traveller alone in the decade before the Great War: the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the many friends she made. And the greatest treasure of all, to me, a poor quality photo, but which showed a pastel self-portrait of a young pretty girl with curly hair, a fresh face and a tilted nose. Nelly finally came to life.

To me the whole episode is extraordinary, and heartbreaking. Even writing about it now makes me feel slightly sick. How can any organisation create, collect and curate an archive and then lose it, or worse? It seems such an insult to Nelly, to Ida, to the women who created these collections and to the families who donated them for safekeeping. Yet again Nelly had eluded me. She must have walked through those same rooms in Gammeltorv, visiting her uncle and learning a little of the family business. And is it a coincidence that all the personalities connected with the archive, not just Nelly but Ida, Anna, Johanne Heiborg, Janet Ross and Mette Gad, are female? Why were they not truly valued or kept safe?

When I came to write my book, I called it ‘A Hidden Life’, and quoted George Eliot from Middlemarch:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life,