Treasures of the lager louts

But don't expect any unifying taste. Ancient hippos from 3000BC are prized alongside the most abstract Picasso. The works were all bought out of a passion for art by three generations of the Jacobsen brewing dynasty: J C, Carl and Helge. They were opinionated and unforgiving and couldn't agree about anything, let alone painting. "Patricide ran in this family when it came to art," says Flemming Friborg, director of the New Carlsberg Museum in Copenhagen. "The son would hate what the father liked, and that led to competition and one-upmanship." This was a family at war.

With fat wallets, the three men collected art the way other people collect, well, beermats. So when they went shopping, the dealers knew about it. Their purchases, made between 1840 and 1930, represent a kind of supermarket sweep, a dash through the aisles of the the best in Egyptian, classical and modern art. This gave rise to an idiosyncratic family collection to rival in scope that of the Guggenheims and the Gettys, the Carnegies and the Mellons. No wonder the sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose work Carl championed, wrote of them: "Today the Medicis are in Copenhagen." Indeed, Carl was so confident of his artistic sensibility that he took it upon himself to offer Rodin advice like a Medici potentate: "You should leave that breast alone... and why don't you sculpt the hands this way?" How Rodin, the respected creator of The Kiss, must have cringed.

It was J C Jacobsen, born in 1811, who made the millions that his son Carl would soon spend. His stroke of luck came when he decided to brew the fashionable new lager instead of heavier traditional beers. Thus he built a billion-pound empire that today sells Carlsberg and Tuborg worldwide. Within a few years his small family brewery had grown into a sprawling factory outside the capital. And it was J C who put ideas into his son's head. As the only child and heir, Carl was to inherit everything. After all, the new lager was named after him. Carl was to be a brewer, but he must also be a gentleman. To this end he was sent to a strict boarding school, modelled on the lines of an English public school. Later his father whisked him off to Pompeii and other ancient sites on the grand tour. Though J C loved sculpture, it wasn't art so much as science that fired him. Moving among the great and the good, he became a government adviser, and invited Louis Pasteur, the foremost scientist of his day, to stay with him. Showcasing the work of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, which he adored, he bequeathed his art to the public.

Like his beer, J C saw Carl as a project, always ripe for improvement. Nothing his son did was ever enough. J C bullied him, with the result that he always suffered from a stammer. And when Carl made the mistake of falling in love with his cousin, J C was furious. "He thought her dull and not good enough for his son," says Friborg. "So he sent Carl to England and France to study brewing and get him out of the way."

It took Carl 10 years before he could forget his cousin and fall in love with Ottilia, a woman he met on his travels in Scotland and married in 1874 at the age of 32. He had firm ideas about the business and set up his own rival firm, trading under a similar name. He too had a genius for anticipating the public's taste, and his modern brewery was soon making money. Now he could collect what he wanted.

Carl's passion was for the ancient world — the reason the collection includes so many Egyptian and Roman masterpieces. By 1882 he had amassed enough art to open the first of two galleries. He also set up a multi-million-pound trust bequeathing his collection to the nation, and a scholarship fund. One beneficiary of the trust was Niels Bohr, the Danish atomic physicist who went on to win the Nobel prize.

Ottilia was perplexed by Carl's obsession. Frail and exhausted from eight pregnancies, she couldn't understand why her rich husband denied her luxuries. She may have been married to Croesus but she was living with Scrooge. Between 1880 and 1890 he bought so much art that he narrowly avoided bankruptcy. "The trouble with you is that you have grown rich too quickly," his father once told him. He had a point. Carl could be flashy. He threw huge parties at his house, observing through a spyhole his guests enjoying his art. He gave Copenhagen the statue of the Little Mermaid, now a symbol of the city. Later in his career his take-home pay would come to the equivalent of £2.5m a year. He was still at loggerheads with his father. J C, now old and sick, and Carl hadn't spoken in several years although their houses and gardens were adjacent. It was only when the old man fell ill on a trip to Rome that Carl travelled to his bedside. "I saw deep into his soul, which perhaps I did not succeed in doing at home, so everything else is of little consequence," J C told his wife. He was reconciled with his son on his deathbed.

There was more bereavement to come in Carl's life. Four of his children died, including his eldest son, Alf, who fell victim to scarlet fever aged 10. "Alf was my best hope," he wrote in his diary. Ottilia followed soon after at the age of 49. Grief-stricken, Carl threw himself even more into art.
His son Helge now became the focus of his attention. Carl began to repeat the behaviour of his own father: he sent his son to boarding school and then to study brewing. And, like his own father, who had spurned his wish to marry his cousin, he ignored Helge's pleas to be allowed to study art history. Though Helge obeyed his father and joined the business, he spent every spare moment studying art, travelling constantly. His passion was for modernity. Born in 1882, he came of age when impressionism was making its mark. Van Gogh and Gauguin, Degas and Picasso were his obsessions. He had his own family money to spend and he knew his modern purchases were infuriating his father.

"As to the impressionists," Carl had once said, "I declare myself a non-voter. I would rather do without that kind of art, which is beyond my understanding and a nuisance." Carl's attitude never changed. As late as 1903 he sent his son a postcard from Berlin: "One of the galleries here has a show of Manet and his like, the Impressionists. Awful, mannered and ghastly..."

There was no common ground for father and son. Even when Carl lay dying from cancer in 1914 and Helge visited him, the most gracious thing Carl could find to write afterwards was this: "When from the window I saw you leave... I noticed that your gait is very lacking in grace... I too walked poorly when I was a boy, my father was always nagging me..." He was dead within days.

The corpse was hardly cold before Helge began purging the museum of his father's taste. Out went the plaster replicas Carl had bought to fill gaps in the collection of antiquities. He spared Rodin, but got rid of a lot of French sculpture. Helge's modernist masterpieces now had pride of place.
That year he helped organise a long-awaited show of French art at the Danish National Gallery. Everyone from Manet to Matisse was represented. But weeks before the works were to be returned to Paris, war broke out and the pictures could not come home. This turned out to be a gift to the art world: Parisian dealers now had a safe showroom for their wares, and many collectors, including Helge, snapped up the masterpieces on offer. He was able, for instance, to buy a favourite picture from Monet, Shadows on the Sea.

Helge continued to shop after the war, vying with other industrialists and bankers for precious Van Goghs and Cézannes. But his spree came to an end when currency restrictions were imposed in Denmark in the 1930s and he found his wallet depleted. Though Helge had no children of his own, his family trust continues. The Carlsberg Foundation, set up by J C, has £20m a year to spend on science, and its sister, the New Carlsberg, endowed by Carl, nearly £5m for the arts. In little over 100 years the dynasty of J C, Carl and Helge went from beer to eternity, just as they had planned all along.

The exhibition Ancient Art to Post-Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, opens at the Royal Academy, London, on September 18. Telephone 020 7300 8000 or visit www.royalacademy.org.uk