Still life, landscape, and marine painter Emil Carlsen began his professional training while still a teenager in his native Denmark. After taking drawing lessons from an older cousin, he entered the Copenhagen Royal Academy where he studied architecture, painting, and sculpture. In 1872 he moved to the United States, settling in Chicago. Carlsen first became an assistant to an architect and then to another Danish painter, Lauritz B. Holst, a specialist in marines. He began giving painting lessons and teaching in a school of mechanical drawing. When Holst returned to Denmark, Carlsen took over his studio. He soon obtained a job teaching at the Chicago Academy of Design, now the Art Institute of Chicago. Among his friends was the young painter, J. Francis Murphy.
In 1875 Carlsen returned briefly to Denmark and traveled to Paris where he was first exposed to, and greatly affected by, the work of Jean-Baptiste-Sim‚on Chardin. By 1876 he was in Boston, painting dark still lifes, teaching, and assisting the animal painter, Alexander Pope. In 1879, he held a disastrous auction of his work in order to pay his bills. Only half of the paintings sold, and he ended up further in debt after the sale. At this time, he also worked as an engraver. Several years later, the New York dealer, T.J. Blakeslee, took an interest in Carlsen and sent him to Paris for two years. Leaving in 1884, he arrived in France and sought out the society of French artists. He saw the work of the impressionists but does not seem to have spent much time with other American students abroad, although it is probable he established his friendship with the San Franciscan, Arthur Mathews, at this time. In return for Blakeslee's investment, Carlsen painted a floral still life for him each month. It was one of these "payments" which was probably his first exhibited work in an Academy annual exhibition.
Upon returning in 1886, Carlsen took a studio on Twenty-third Street in New York, next to his friend, Murphy. He didn't stay long, however, for the following year he was lured to San Francisco with the directorship of the school of the San Francisco Art Association, a position he held for two years. He built his own studio in San Francisco and gave lessons at the San Francisco Art Students League; his association with Arthur Mathews was close at this time. For the next two years he traveled between New York and California, finally settling on the East Coast in 1891, much to the chagrin of the San Francisco art community.
In 1896, he married Luella Mary Ruby, and the two moved into a studio on Fifty-nineth Street, Carlsen's city residence for the rest of his life. Recognition began to come around 1902 when he was elected to the Society of American Artists which awarded him its Shaw purchase prize in 1904, and Webb Prize in 1905. Around that time, he began building a country home in Falls Village, Connecticut. Now a member of the Academy as well, he began to exhibit more frequently in its annual exhibitions; the Academy awarded him its Inness Gold Medal in 1907, Saltus Medal in 1916, and Carnegie Prize in the winter exhibition of 1919. From 1911 he was represented by the prominent New York dealer, William Macbeth.
Carlsen had long complained about the time teaching took from his own painting, and after finally settling in New York he tried to do less of it. Nevertheless, he taught antique and still life classes at the Academy school for four years, beginning in 1905, and he later lectured at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. From 1920 to 1923, he served on the Council.
