After our aborted trip to Ladonia, we took the ferry from Helsingborg, Sweden, to Helsingor, Denmark, then drove back to Hald in the continuing rain.

The West coast of Sweden is comparable to North Zealand, only flatter, less wooded and a little less manicured, but we’re glad we made the trip over and back, even though we were only in Sweden for a day. We had spent a lot more time in Sweden back in 2004 (or 2005, I don’t remember which) when we traveled there with Dale’s mother, Jane, for her to visit her ancestral home (Jane was a first-generation Swedish-American).

Today, we decided to take the train in to Copenhagen to visit, among other things, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, an art museum.

The Carlsberg Museum was founded and funded by the creator of the Carlsberg brewing dynasty. The guidebooks all talked about the collection of French Impressionist paintings there, but when we arrived, we discovered that there was a special exhibit of just one of the Impressionists, Edgar Degas, best known for his paintings and sculptures of ballerinas.

Because the exhibit contained privately owned works, no photographs were allowed, but the exhibit spanned 3 floors of the museum and displaced all of the museum’s Impressionist collection which had to be stored elsewhere during the Degas exhibition.

Degas differed from the other Impressionist painters in that he did not paint en plein air, he painted in a studio. He also seems to have been obsessed with just a handful of themes: ballerinas, horses, washer-women and women getting out of the bath, though he produced works on all of these themes in multiple media: oil, pastel, charcoal, graphite and crayon, to list a few. We enjoyed the exhibit.

We also enjoyed the museum. In between the wing where the Degas exhibit was staged there was a glass-domed atrium full of palm trees and tropical trees. The palms were hitting the roof and we wondered what they planned to do about it since the palms are still growing.

The other wing was dedicated primarily to classic art, primarily ancient sculptures, like in this room. Dale’s in there somewhere, peeking around one of the busts.

When we visited Turkey and Greece last summer, we couldn’t understand why all the ancient Roman and Greek statutes were missing noses. The ones in the Carlsberg museum had the same defect:

I am happy to report that we have located all the missing noses, as well as a couple ears! They’re hanging on a wall on the 2nd floor in room 34.

Before leaving, we went up to the rooftop where we had a view of Tivoli Gardens next door (that’s City Hall on the right).

We hustled back downstairs…

…in order to make a quick visit to the nearby Nationalmuseet, the National History Museum, before it closed.

Although there was a Viking exhibit going on, we breezed through it, finding it less informative than the Viking exhibit we had seen in Ribe. But there was a permanent pre-Viking era display that had a couple interesting exhibits, like this horn display…

…and this painted reproduction of King Harald Bluetooth’s Rune Stone that we saw in Jelling – here you can easily make out the snake encircling the lion. This is supposedly how the rune stone would have looked back in the day.

We didn’t spend much time in the Nationalmuseet. We were anxious to get over to Tivoli!