Caroline Mathilde og Struensee på ridetur ved Hørsholm 1870 - 1873

Wilhelm Marstrand sketched this image of ‘Caroline Mathilde and Struensee on Horseback at Hørsholm’. The story goes like this; Caroline Mathilde, the young Queen of Denmark, was married off to a mentally unstable king, and found herself in a very lonely position at court. Johann Friedrich Struensee, the king’s physician, would become her confidant and lover. Their affair challenged the norms of the 18th-century European aristocracy, where royal marriages were about power and alliances, not love. The sketch hints at the tensions simmering beneath the surface of courtly life. There is the queen, a woman trapped in a gilded cage, and the doctor, a man of the people, who dared to cross social boundaries. In their affair we see a narrative of forbidden love, but also of a woman seeking agency in a world that denied it to her. Marstrand captures that feeling of the illicit, and the danger of the tightrope they walked. Ultimately their story ended in tragedy – Struensee was executed, and Caroline Mathilde exiled. Yet, their story still resonates with the universal desire for freedom and the courage to defy convention.