Bertha Wegmann (1847-1926) ~ The Artist Jeanna Bauck, 1887 ✿

Bertha Wegmann (1847-1926) ~ The Artist Jeanna Bauck, 1887

Bertha Wegmann (1847-1926) was a Danish portrait painter of German ancestry. She was the first woman to hold a chair at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. At the age of five, her family moved to Copenhagen, where her father became a merchant. He was an art lover and spent much of his spare time painting. She showed an interest in drawing at an early age, but received no formal education until she was nineteen, when she began taking lessons from Frederik Ferdinand Helsted, Heinrich Buntzen and Frederik Christian Lund.

She studied with the historical painter Wilhelm von Lindenschmit the Younger, later with the genre painter Eduard Kurzbauer, but she was not satisfied with learning in a studio atmosphere and decided to study directly from nature.

She made friends with the Swedish painter, Jeanna Bauck, and took several study trips to Italy with her. In 1881, they moved to Paris where Wegmann exhibited at several salons and received an "honorable mention".