A Church at Ramsau, Bavaria (Kirken i Ramsau, Bayern)

(Vilhelm Bendz)

On the 18th July 1832 Wilhelm Bendz started out on his Grand Tour to Italy. He travelled via Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Nuremberg to Munich, where he stayed for a whole year. On the 6th of September he set off on foot to Rome together with the landscape painter Thomas Fearnley and the genre painter Josef Petzl. After ten days walking the three young men reached the village of Ramsau in the Bavarian Alps. There they stayed for a few days and Bendz drew and painted a number of pictures of the little town, of which at least two depicted the beautiful old church.

This painting has only recently come to light. The church is shown in the middle ground, partly hidden by a large white-washed house. The artist was standing on a grass covered, rocky slope, but he was not high enough to see more of the church than the top of the white-painted tower and the superimposed onion domes which are tipped by an orb and a star. The building is seen against a forest-clad mountain slope and a grey-blue sky, densely packed with clouds. Another picture of the church at Ramsau (exhibition catalogue, The Hirschprung collection, 1996, no. 125, repr. p. 195) depicts the whole of the brightly illuminated building, which is viewed from the apse, as a complex series of architectural forms receding in perspective. As usual Bendz sought out the hardest artistic challenges in order to solve them. In the far distance of both paintings we see the snow-covered silhouette of the mountain Hoher Göll.

Bendz was preoccupied with painting from nature, which was a new venture for him. However a year spent among German landscape painters had not tempted him to romanticise his subjects. His depictions of Ramsau and the surrounding area are evocative but marked by Professor Eckersberg’s teaching about the conscientious rendering of things seen and the correct use of perspective. Bendz’s pictures of the Bavarian Alps were probably his last works. The weather turned cold and he was already struggling with poor health. On the 14th of November he died of severe intestinal inflammation at Vicenza in Northern Italy.