Still Life with
Lemons and Sugar Cubes

Emil Carlsen is counted among the important early California painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1853. At first pursuing a career in architecture, by the age of twenty he had emigrated to the United States, finding himself in Chicago and beginning a career in painting. He studied briefly in Paris and returning to Chicago, began to teach at the Art Institute. He then moved on to San Francisco and shared a studio with his close friend from the Paris days, Arthur Mathews, followed by periods in New York City and Boston. Finding sales difficult in California, Carlsen again left for New York and Connecticut where his career turned more into a mode of success. He became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1906. Carlsen, though chiefly self-taught, was most influenced by his stay in Paris and his study of French art. He is considered an impressionist and his most successful period is characterized by softly colorful and delicate landscapes, seascapes, and in particular beautifully rendered still lifes in an almost oriental manner in terms of objects and compositions. There is always a very ethereal sense of light in Carlsen's most successful canvases. Carlsen was well honored in his lifetime and won medals at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. He died in 1932.