Christian Albrecht Von Benzon (Copenhagen, 1816 - Paris, 184 - Lot 86

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Lot n° 86
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Estimation :
4000 - 5000 EUR
Christian Albrecht Von Benzon (Copenhagen, 1816 - Paris, 184 - Lot 86
Christian Albrecht Von Benzon (Copenhagen, 1816 - Paris, 1849) Interior of a studio - The child artists Oil on canvas (lined) 109 x 89,5 cm Signed Ch. Benzon 182 (Restorations) Without frame The life of this cosmopolitan artist, who died at the age of thirty-three at the dawn of a promising career, is astonishing. Christian Albrecht von Bentzon was born into a family of Danish nobility. His father, chamberlain to the court, was a wealthy landowner. His mother was a singer at the Royal Danish Opera. The young man trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and began painting portraits, including, at the age of nineteen, that of Hans-Christian Andersen. In the early 1840s he moved to Düsseldorf and married Marie-Thérèse Rosalie Cazin. Their salon soon became one of the city's brilliant cultural centers. Von Bentzon had by then reached his artistic maturity, as can be seen in one of the paintings he sent to Denmark: The Death of Saint Canute (1844), a virtuoso and tormented composition that seems to be the work of a Nordic Paul Delaroche. In 1845, the artist moved to Paris and exhibited at the Salon, under the French name of Baron Christian de Benzon, a historical scene entitled The Norman leader Hastings seizing an Italian city by deception. The following year, he won a gold medal with another scene from the early Middle Ages: Congress held in Rouen in 945, sent to the town hall of Rouen. But no doubt this aristocratic painter was living too high. In 1849, he was sent to prison for debts and died of cholera. Christian Benzon was not only into the noise and fury of the olden days. In 1846 he presented Les Derniers moments d'un libertin (was he thinking of himself?). Our studio interior, painted with Danish precision, recalls the charming vein of child painters, previously used in allegories of the arts. The work is also worthwhile for the description of this artist's den with its antique plaster busts, its window screen screening the light, its mirrors in pairs, its green plants and its basket overflowing with crumpled drawings.
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