Johannes Wiedewelt

Wiedewelt was the most distinguished Danish sculptor before Bertel Thorvaldsen, whom he taught at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. He was born in Copenhagen and taught by his father, Just, sculptor to the royal court. In 1750 Wiedewelt went to Paris, where he trained under Guillaume Coustou the Younger  and won a silver medal at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1753. Upon the foundation of the Royal Danish Painting, Sculpture and Building Academy in 1754, he was awarded an annual stipend from the king that enabled him to go on to Rome, where he arrived on June 7, 1754, initially lodging at the Académie de France and then with Richard Wilson’s pupil Adolf Friedrich Harper in Via Condotti. After Harper’s departure from Rome in 1756, Wiedewelt lived with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, apparently as his lover, in a room in Via di San Basilio, working closely with him on a major study of Antique sculpture in Rome, and making expeditions to Naples, Pompeii, and Herculaneum. He had his portrait painted by Peder Als, a Danish pupil of Anton Raphael Mengs, in Rome in 1758. Like Harper and their mutual friend, the Danish artist Johan Mandelberg, Wiedewelt took to copying Wilson’s drawings of motifs and landscapes in Rome. Wiedewelt and Mandelberg left Rome together on July 1, 1758, and traveled slowly back across Europe to Copenhagen, where they arrived on October 6. Both were to become important teachers at the Danish Academy. In 1759, Wiedewelt, like his father, became sculptor to the royal court. He visited London in the late 1760s and made a particular study of garden design, including Stowe, which influenced his work, for example, at Jægerspris. He fell into poverty toward the end of his life and apparently committed suicide in a lake outside Copenhagen on December 17, 1802.