The factory of Madame P. Ipsen, widow (P.Ipsens Enke) established at 33 Bredgade, Copenhagen, Denmark in 1843, was one of many factories in the area specialising in wares, often with neo-classical styling, as here. Berthold Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), the great neo-classical Danish sculptor, settled in Rome in 1797. There he employed assistants to work on the enormous number of marble statues in the classical manner which he produced over a period of forty years. His fame was immense and his return to Copenhagen at the age of 67 in 1837 was triumphal. He housed a vast collection of his own work and excavated antiquities from Pompeii and Herculaneum in a Roman-style building in the centre of Copenhagen. It is now his mausoleum. His own work was a particularly elegant and lively interpretation of the style, accurately based on the simplest classicism. This medallion and its companion, 'Night' and 'Day', from Thorvaldsen's models of 1815, were extremely popular and taken up by many companies as decorative motifs, in almost any material.

The Ipsen factory specialised in a very fine clay, evident here in the smooth surface and crisp modelling of this unglazed medallion.