Vilhelm Bendz

Bio

William Ferdinand Bendz was the son of the mayor of Odense, a town on the island of Funen, which was also the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. In later life the poet recalled his home town at the time when both he and Bendz were small: ‘ ….. I well remember the strong high-spirited boy, who often rode on the bannisters of his parents’ high staircase, merrily singing his songs’. (H.C.Andersen, Journey from Copenhagen to the Rhine, Copenhagen, 1855). However it is unlikely that the two boys ever played together, as they were about the same age but socially far from equals. One of the first pupils of C. W. Eckersberg at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Bendz had enrolled there in 1820. While he seems to have left his master’s immediate circle for a four year period, he continued his studies at the Academy and became a central figure of the new school of younger painters. Indeed, two of his finest early pictures are of artists at work, a portrait of Christian Holm (1826), turning from his easel to look at the viewer and a portrait of a young artist (Ditlev Blunck) examining a sketch in a mirror.

Bendz’s love of sophisticated lighting, complex compositional forms and hidden symbolism are not found in the work of his master or his contemporaries and suggest that, had he lived longer, he might have developed into a truly great painter. He was evidently fascinated with the role and work of the artist, as can be seen in the two interiors cited above and his famous painting of The Life Class at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (1826) which shows the students gathered around drawing a nude male figure.

In this picture, like his most famous work The Smoking Club (1827-28), he clearly enjoyed playing with the effects of dramatic chiaroscuro. In 1827 Bendz returned to Eckersberg’s circle. Gradually he simplified his style, as if he had now satisfied himself with the extent of his bravura talent and was now ready to develop a clearer but at the same time more subtle vision of the world.

Over the next four years his interior scenes display delicately harmonized colors set off by unusual lighting, more often from natural rather the artificial light of his earlier interiors. In 1831 he set out on an unconventional grand tour route of his own choosing, made possible with the help of a royal grant. After passing through Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden he settled in Munich for a year. There he painted his last major work, Artists in the Evening at Finck’s Coffee House, evidence that he was immediately received into the rapidly developing Munich art world. In the autumn of 1832 he set out for Italy but tragically fell ill in Vicenza where he died, aged only twenty-eight.