This postcard is property of The Royal Library. The photograph by Holger Damsgaard features on the right Valdemar Andersen at his and his col-league painter Harald Moltke's exhibition in 1912. Juliane is seen on the left - wearing funny rush shoes. 

Long after midnight, only a couple of hours before the official opening of the National Exhibition in Aarhus in 1909, artist Valdemar Andersen fell down from the top of the triumphal arc he was about to finish. He and his team of painters were struggling hard to be ready on time, and already at this time he had achieved so much fame for his decorations all over the National Exhibition that the King visited him in hospital to show his respect.

The Evidence

But several broken bones did not make Valdemar Andersen abstain from finishing the very last details and thereby we can document that the eight can-vases in the possession of Post & Tele Museum were painted in 1909 and not in 1926 as mentioned in MuseumsPosten vol. 4/2005.
 

The red tower of the Palace Hotel surrounded by scaffolding is seen vaguely in the background of the painting to the left of the City Hall Tower.



 

From his hospital bed he wrote to his wife Juliane and asked her to send him some picture postcards of Copenhagen as a background for the paintings he was going to make about the eventful course of a letter from the writer to the recipient. To Valdemar Andersen the central picture was the woman post-ing the letter. She should be in a typical Copenha-gen environment and the choice fell on the at the time brand-new town hall square where we can see the scaffolding around the tower of the Palace Hotel. It was not finished before 1910; a small piece of advertisement by the way, as also the hotel was decorated by Valdemar Andersen. On the other hand, the lure players are missing from the horizon because they only came later as a result of the Na-tional Exhibition.

Unfortunately there are no photos of the hanging of the paintings at that time. On the other hand, the original paintings at Post & Tele Museums are a rarity as most of the decorations were lost when the exhibition closed down.