How Bertha Wegmann communicated the 19th-century female experience

‘I often feel like being in a desert, and there is no one who understands me,’ wrote Bertha Wegmann to the Swedish painter Hildegard Thorell in 1883.

A brilliant artist and women’s suffragist, Bertha Wegmann (1847-1926) was one of Denmark’s leading portrait painters, and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. However, she was never fully embraced by the Danish art establishment, and remained an outsider all of her life.

Offered in the British and European Art sale on 14 December 2023 is a highly complex painting of roses, which reveals an artist who was constantly pushing the aesthetic possibilities of modernism.

‘She was hugely influential in her day,’ says Alastair Plumb, Christie’s Head of Sale, 19th Century European Art, ‘but even in her lifetime you start to see a process of exclusion and oblivion settling in. By the middle of the 20th century she had been all but written out of the history books.’

Born in Switzerland, Wegmann moved with her family to Copenhagen when she was five years old. Her father, a manufacturer and art lover, encouraged his shy daughter’s artistic talents by sending her to study under the imperious direction of Frederik Christian Lund (1826-1901). In 1868, she went to Munich to complete her training and fell in with a group of liberated female artists, among them the Swedish painter Jeanna Bauck (1840-1926), who became her closest collaborator.

There is a painting by Bauck of Wegmann working in their shared studio in Munich (above) that reveals the close intellectual bond between the two women. Wegmann has her back to the viewer and is absorbed in painting a portrait of the eminent neurologist Peter Dethlefsen. The scene is one of professional industry, but the traditional male gaze has been subverted: the male sitter is passive while the female is active.

‘It is almost a manifesto of female emancipation,’ says Plumb, who explains that Wegmann and Bauck would incorporate symbols in their paintings that communicated a different female experience from the one depicted. ‘I find Wegmann’s work constantly fascinating,’ he says. ‘Once you start looking, you notice all these little clues — in the way a woman’s hand is painted, for example, or what she is holding — as to what she is really thinking.’

In 1883, Wegmann returned to Denmark from Munich on a high. She had been honourably mentioned at the salons in Paris, and awarded the much-coveted Thorvaldsen Medal by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts for a portrait of her sister. Success seemed inevitable; but it was not immediate.

Paintings that had been celebrated for their radical modernity in France and Germany were viewed with deep suspicion by the conservative Danish elite. ‘Would you believe they found Jeanna’s portrait to be “flighty”,’ she complained to her friend Thorell, ‘simply because she is not shown all pretty and nicely combed with her hands neatly in her lap.’

Faced with an indifferent public and badly in need of money, Wegmann reined in her ambitions and set about producing dignified paintings of eminent Danes that echoed John Singer Sargeant’s aristocratic portraits. She soon hit her stride, showing an ability to capture the inner self of the sitter with a suave precision, and by 1885 was refusing commissions almost every day. Even the esteemed politician J.B.S. Estrup was unable to secure her services.

Women loved to be painted by her because she had empathy. ‘They usually come to me when the external appearance they keep dreaming about is fading,’ she wrote. ‘And I am pained by this, because I understand them and so I care for them.’ She described portraiture as ‘psychology’; and the historian Ernst Jonas Bencard has argued that Wegmann ‘creates a shame-free — as opposed to a shame-less — image of female sexuality’.

Yet Wegmann was restless. She longed to paint what she wanted, and found escape in landscapes and wildflowers — subjects through which she could explore the true female experience without criticism. ‘She particularly liked painting dandelions,’ says Plumb. ‘Because she saw them as tenacious and strong-willed, they represented the female spirit.’

Wildflowers became a metaphor for her own existence, too: untamed and independent. She did not conform to stereotypes, and her personal life never interrupted her art. Her long relationship with the female writer Toni Möller was considered bohemian and attracted attention, but not disapprobation, and she used her public profile to speak up for women’s rights.

Many of these issues are explored in the highly complex painting Roses in a glass vase, painted around 1906. Each flower represents a different stage of the life cycle, from bud to withered rose.

‘I think of it as a portrait in a way,’ says Plumb. ‘There is this very impressionistic background of pale greys and spots of yellow, against which these beautiful cut flowers are contained in this glass vase. Then you notice that Wegmann has incorporated the odd wildflower into the bouquet.’

For many years it was hard to find references to Wegmann in the official histories of Danish art. For all her abilities, she didn’t fit comfortably into the national story, and not one of her paintings could be found in a Danish art museum or gallery. ‘I think there was a certain amount of xenophobia and misogyny at play,’ says Plumb. ‘She was born a foreigner, she had studied abroad and she was a woman.’

That has changed recently. In 2022, a large-scale exhibition of Wegmann’s paintings at The Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen and the Skovgaard Museum in Viborg gave audiences the chance to reassess her work. The exhibitions revealed an artist with an emotional complexity, who painted women objectively. She was a painter who knew her own value and maintained it, despite the world being tipped against her sex.

When Wegmann died, in 1926, some of the obituaries championed her singular ability, describing her as the ‘highly sophisticated, the creatively brilliant, the most excellent painter’. Others recognised her outsider status. ‘She was the odd one out,’ wrote one, ‘someone to be measured by a different yardstick.’

Explore art from antiquity to the 21st century at Classic Week, until 15 December 2023 at Christie’s in London