Museum History

The museum’s founder, Christian Ludvig David, was born on July 30, 1878. His parents – Magdalene Juliane née Hagen (1840-1901) and Johannes Hage Christian David, a railroad engineer (1837-1890) – died relatively early, but did not leave young Christian and his two little sisters penniless. The three inherited a considerable fortune from their father’s family that had been made by their great-grandfather Joseph Nathan David (1758-1830), a wholesaler, and their grandfather Christian Georg Nathan David (1793-1874), an economist. The latter had broken with the family’s Jewish traditions and had converted to Christianity. He had been a member of the constitutional assembly and had held high posts in the state administration, serving as minister of finance in 1864 and 1865.

C. L. David completed his law studies at the University of Copenhagen in 1903. He chose a career as a practicing attorney and at the early age of 33 was granted the right to plead cases before the Supreme Court. As a litigation attorney, David made a name for himself especially with his defense of Emil Glückstadt (1875-1923), the bank director who was accused of bearing the main responsibility for the period’s biggest Danish financial scandal, the Landmandsbanken bankruptcy in 1922.

David’s business interests, however, were a far more profitable aspect of his professional life. He was active on the boards of several of the day’s leading Danish companies and also served as their legal advisor. In addition to the income that this work brought him, the stocks that David held in these successful enterprises also helped add to his fortune. His holdings in De Forenede Vagtselskaber were particularly important. By buying up security companies in Norway and Sweden during the inter-war period and adding cleaning companies, the enterprise grew under David’s chairmanship into a large multinational group that was later consolidated under the name ISS.

David never married, and when he died without an heir in 1960, he left a large fortune and an art collection in the townhouse at Kronprinsessegade no. 30. David willed his country estate, Marienborg on Lake Bagsværd, which he had bought in 1934, to the Danish state to be used as the summer residence of the country’s prime or foreign minister.

C. L. David made his first art purchases as a young attorney in the 1910s, when he acquired paintings and sculptures by Danish artists, mostly from the preceding few generations. As David’s wealth increased, however, this part of his collection was soon overshadowed by acquisitions of European furniture and decorative art from the 17th-18th century. It was a field that had great potential for a well-to-do collector, since many important foreign collections were broken up during the depression of the 1920s and 1930s.

David developed a special interest in Danish and European faience and porcelain. In order to put this part of his collection in relief – and to cultivate a field that was unique in Denmark – he soon also acquired pieces from the world of Islam. This laid the foundation for a third important part of the collection.

In 1917, C. L. David bought the townhouse at Kronprinsessegade no. 30 that had been built in c. 1806-1807, probably to designs by J. H. Rawert, the city surveyor. With this acquisition, David had secured a suitable home for himself and room for his growing art collection. The building held a special significance for him as well, since it had belonged to his great-grandfather J. N. David a century before.

Between 1918 and 1920, the architect Carl Petersen (1874-1923) changed the slope of the roof to add two large rooms and one small one on the fourth story, along with a connecting staircase, to house the art collection. A special gallery for the ceramics collection was built in 1928 by one of Carl Petersen’s employees, the architect Kaare Klint (1888-1954), who was also responsible for outfitting what today is the open repository at the back of the same story. There was access to the art collection from David’s residence on the story below, which was also decorated with works of art. The other two stories were rented out.

From the early 1930s, David had toyed with the idea of preserving the collection after his death as a privately owned museum open to the public in the building at Kronprinsessegade no. 30. The C. L. David Foundation and Collection did not become a reality until 1945, however, when the Second World War had ended, after David had survived a serious illness earlier that year. From 1948, the collection was open to the public for only a few hours a week on the third and fourth stories, since David then lived on the second and his law office was located on the first. After David’s death in 1960, opening hours were lengthened as the rest of Kronprinsessegade no. 30 was incorporated into the museum.

In addition to providing the financial basis for the museum’s operations, David had also made sure that there were funds for expanding its holdings. The collection of European furniture and decorative art from the 18th century was augmented throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but it soon became clear that the museum’s most important raison d’être in a Scandinavian context was its collection of Islamic art. Since the 1980s, this is virtually the only part of the collection that has been strengthened through purchases. In order to house the growing number of works of art, the neighboring building, Kronprinsessegade no. 32, was bought in 1986. The first expansion of the museum premises in this building – a long room with showcases for Islamic miniatures – was opened four years later. The miniature gallery was designed by the architect Wilhelm Wohlert (1920-2007), while Wohlert Architects were responsible for later remodeling in 1999 and 2005-2009. In this most recent phase, the space allotted to the Islamic collection was doubled and the exhibition completely reinstalled.