The Daily Valdemar No. 21: April 2

Valdemar Andersen, full-page cartoon for the satirical magazine Tik Tak, 1911.
Scan by Simon Bang.

Today's moment of calm is sending a 215-years-birthday greeting to one of the great storytellers in history, Hans Christian Andersen.

He was by all accounts not particularly fond of children to put it mildly, nor are his stories in their original format child-friendly by today's standards, but since the beginning of the 20th century his name bears an iconography in which the author is telling his stories with a child on his knee. 

Having a child on the knee is in itself the imagery of a world complete in time and space. There is no need to reach outside of what seems a bubble of eternity. The two in unity before us could be anybody at any time presented as they are as if cut in silhouette. Their clothes are crumpled and curled in that their time is dedicated to play not to perfection. They define and frame a room presented through patterns only. Everything is growing, cascading and running across. With its many focal points it is as such a conventional living room of 1911, but made modern through its presentation in the flat two dimensions of the picture plane. 

Henri Matisse did his The Dessert: Harmony in Red in 1908 of a living room in which the flower ornamentations grow beyond the wall and table on which they were painted or embroidered to take over the whole room. The Matisse has the dimensions to take over an actual wall. Valdemar tells a story on a page in which even a conventional room is revealed to contain the very magic within a dancing frame.