Faaborg Museum
The canned-goods manufacturer Mads Rasmussen built a museum for the artists of Funen. Carl Petersen designed a small temple to art with strong colours and an octagonal domed room. The museum is one of the earliest buildings of Nordic Classicism.
Mads Rasmussen made his fortune from canned food and was a friend of the Funen Painters, a group of Danish realists such as Peter Hansen, Fritz Syberg and Johannes Larsen. He founded the museum in 1910 and had Carl Petersen design a new building, completed in 1915. Petersen was one of the first Danish architects to turn away from National Romanticism towards classicism.
The museum is a sequence of rooms of different shapes and colours. The domed room is octagonal and has a statue of Mads Rasmussen by Kai Nielsen. The walls are painted in strong colours, and the floors have patterns in stone. Petersen wanted the architecture to strengthen the experience of the art. He later wrote about contrasts in architecture, in form, colour and material.
Faaborg Museum is regarded as one of the first buildings of Nordic Classicism and influenced Swedish and Finnish architects. It shows how a small museum in a small town could become the model for a whole style. The museum is still active and shows the art of the Funen Painters in the rooms that were built for it.