After Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 - 1844) | D'après Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 - 1844)

The present bust is likely to be one of the two plasters ordered from Thorvaldsen by the sitter's wife Caterina di Branciforte, Princess Butera, in correspondence from 1817. The subject, Georg Wilhelm Wilding, was a German aristocrat and diplomat working in Rome, Naples and St Petersburg who married to Italian Princess Caterina di Branciforte in 1812. Three years later, in 1815, the royal couple commissioned portrait busts from Thorvaldsen in marble. The original plaster version from the artist's studio, together with the marble, is in the Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen (inv. nos. A275 and A890).