A Young Artist (Ditlev Blunck) Examining a Sketch in a Mirror

Copenhagen in the 1820s is remembered as a golden age for Danish painting, and the young Wilhelm Bendz spent it painting his fellow artists at their trade. Here he shows a friend, the painter Ditlev Blunck, pausing over a canvas he is at work on. Blunck holds it up to a mirror, an old studio trick for judging a composition by seeing it reversed and fresh. We only ever see the back of the picture. Its front reaches us solely as a reflection, which lets Bendz nod at the old idea of art as a mirror held up to life. Behind the everyday scene sits a newer conviction of his generation, that a painter was an intellectual in his own right, worth showing at the very moment of weighing up his own work.