Wilhelm Bendz

Wilhelm Bendz liked to paint his friends indoors by lamplight, young Copenhagen artists smoking, talking, and sketching in rooms lit by a single candle or the glow of a stove. He had trained under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, the teacher at the heart of what later became known as the Danish Golden Age, and he had a real gift for the hard problem of artificial light falling across faces and cluttered interiors.

He painted his own brothers in their shared rooms and the life class at the Academy in Copenhagen, quiet records of a small, close world of painters at work. In 1831 he set out on the long study journey to Italy that almost every ambitious northern artist made.

He never reached Rome. After stops in Munich and Venice he broke his trip at Vicenza to visit a friend, fell ill with a lung infection, and died there in November 1832. He was 28.