David Collection

This guide to the David Collection in Copenhagen opens with a curator's dry line about a lawyer who agreed to buy art he did not even like. It follows Christian Ludvig David from his genuine love of hushed Danish interiors by Vilhelm Hammershøi to the moment a museum director pointed out an embarrassing gap in Denmark's collections, pushing him toward Islamic ceramics, tiles and metalwork he never seemed to love the same way. He moved back into this townhouse, once owned by his own great-grandfather, in 1917 and began opening its upper floors to the public himself.