Studier af rustninger 1914 - 1918

Peter Hansen made these studies of armour using watercolour sometime around the late 19th or early 20th century. It’s all about layering here, the way the metallic sheen of the armour is captured with thin washes of grey and white. You can see the process, the ghost of earlier marks, adjustments, pentimenti as they say in Italian. The paper is raw, almost naked in its simplicity, and the paint is applied in these transparent, tentative strokes. Look at the lower half of the figures, the way the armour fades into bare skin, there’s a fragility that contrasts with the idea of the unyielding metal. And those dabs of yellow, like tiny explosions, give everything a real sense of animation. It reminds me a little of Manet’s way of using thin paint to describe form, but with a touch more vulnerability. It's this open-endedness that makes the studies so compelling, it becomes not just an image of armour, but a reflection on how we construct our own defenses.