The murals on the exterior of the museum were designed in 1847-8 and executed in 1850 by Jørgen Sonne in a sort of coloured plaster intarsia with heavy black outlines. Developing a happy idea of Bindesbøll’s, these tell rather realistically the story of the transport of the sculpture from Rome to Copenhagen. The foliate work on the court walls was carried out by H. C. From in 1844—laurel-trees, oaks, and palms. In the interiors, where Thorwaldsen disposed his own sculptures somewhat less formally than he had the Aegina sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, the intricate and brightly coloured decoration of the barrel vaults is in that Pompeian mode which had been a part of the Romantic Classical tradition ever since the time of Clérisseau and Adam. This provides a happy contrast to so much Neo-Classic white marble statuary set against plain walls painted in strong flat colours. The finest of these ceilings have no modern rivals, even in Adam’s eighteenth-century work, for the precise geometrical organization of the panels and the delicate refinement of the very low plaster reliefs. Bolder and wholly abstract are the floors of tile mosaic arranged in a bewildering variety of patterns, some imitated from Roman models but more of them so original in design that they suggest ‘hardedge’ paintings of the 1960s. In his few other executed works and projects Bindesbøll showed himself considerably less Classical and Schinkelesque than in this museum; perhaps the museum reflects Thorvaldsen’s taste as much or more than his own. Tending, like other Danes of his generation, towards the _Rundbogenstil_ in his urban buildings, for his country houses he arrived at a very direct and logical rural mode in which rustic materials and asymmetrical compositions were controlled by a Romantic Classical sense of order and decorum. If, on the one hand, his interest in bold structural polychromy in the fifties parallels that of the English Butterfield, his domestic mode forecasts that of the English Webb (see Chapters 10 and 12). Bindesbøll’s production was small indeed, but at least the very simple _Rundbogenstil_ Agricultural School of 1856-8 at 13 Bulowsvej in Copenhagen, executed after his death, deserves specific mention here.