C.W. Eckersberg

myminifactory

In 1813, the painter C. W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) came to Rome on his grand educational journey. He moved into the boarding house in via Sistina where Thorvaldsen lived. The following year he painted the portrait of his famous countryman Bertel Thorvaldsen, and when he was to leave the city in 1816 to travel home to Denmark, Thorvaldsen returned the favour by modelling a bust of Eckersberg. This marble version of the bust was given to the museum in 1883 as a present from Eckersberg’s daughters. Eckersberg is portrayed with all the uprightness and honesty that also his contemporaries attributed to him. As a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Eckersberg taught the generation of Danish artists who created the art of the Danish Golden Age in the first half of the 1800s.