Ditlev Blunck

Blunck began his studies in 1814 at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen as a student of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. In 1818 he moved to Munich, where he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, studying there for two years before returning to Copenhagen, where he became a pupil of Johan Ludwig Lund. In 1828 he travelled to Germany and from there also visited Rome often, joining the group of Danish artists around Bertel Thorvaldsen. In August 1840, he was expelled from Denmark, probably due to homosexual acts, but thanks to his close contact with King Christian VIII and the minister Rantzau from Bereitenburg, who were both his patrons, he most likely only had to leave Denmark for a few years. He spent the years following his expulsion in Munich and Vienna, and in 1848 formed a free regiment in Vienna together with comrade painters and went to war against Denmark in the First Schleswig War (1848-52).

We are grateful to Carl Johan Olsson for first suggesting a possible attribution of the present work to Ditlev Blunck on the basis of digital images, and to Dr. Karin Søndergaard, author of Blunk, the 2017 monograph on the artist, for endorsing this attribution on the basis of digital images.

Dr Søndergaard has suggested that the sitter in this sketch may be the same boy depicted by Blunck in a portrait (today in the Stadt- und Schifffahrtsmuseum, Kiel) of circa 1840, although he seems slightly older in the present sketch, which should thus not be considered preparatory for the Kiel picture. On this basis, this sketch may be dated to the early 1840s. Given the Italian provenance of this work, it is possible that Blunck painted it on one of his trips to Italy, probably following his departure from Denmark in late 1840.