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She was not Danish by birth and only became a Danish citizen at 36
Denmark’s most celebrated portraitist of her day was born in Southern Switzerland, in the canton of Graubünden, on December 16, 1847. She only moved to Copenhagen at 5 years old, for her father’s new job running a vinegar factory, and did not apply for Danish citizenship until she was 36, in 1883.
She began taking art classes at 15 years old
Encouraged by her art-loving father, Eberhard Ludwig Wegmann, Wegmann she first studied under the drawing teacher F F Helsted as well as painter F C Lund. She would continue on to train in Copenhagen, despite her mother, Cathrine Mini’s, opposition to her daughter pursuing an artistic career.
Her breakthrough came in France
Wegmann’s big breakthrough came in Paris, where she moved around 1880 and stayed for nearly a decade. In Paris, she was welcomed by a close-knit circle of several other notable Nordic painters, including the Finnish Helene Schjerfbeck and Hildegard Thorell and Jeanna Bauck, from Sweden. Recent scholarship, including Carina Reich’s Becoming Artists: Self-Portraits, Friendship Images and Studio Scenes by Nordic Women Painters in the 1880s (Makadam Förlag, 2021) and Women Artists in Denmark 1880-1910, edited by Inge Lise Mogensen Bech and Lene Bøgh Rønberg (Yale University Press, 2022) explore the ties and circles of this group of Nordic woman painters.
She made her Paris Salon debut in 1881
As Europe’s pre-eminent exhibition for contemporary artists, the Salon offered instant international exposure to artists not just in Paris but across Europe. Wegmann’s participation marked her most significant foray into the artworld to date. To honor the occasion, she chose to exhibit a painting of her best friend, fellow artist, and roommate at the time, Jeanna Bauck, now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm collection.
And won a medal on her first try
The portrait was a hit, it secured Wegmann a coveted “Mention Honorable” from the Jury, a distinction which offered her international exposure and was noted upon in critical reviews published various Parisian journals, such as Le Galois.
She lived and worked alongside her best friend
While epistolary evidence reveals that Wegmann had many close friends with Nordic woman artists, Wegmann’s closest companion – both professionally and personally – was the Swedish artist Jeanna Bauck. The two lived and worked together in Munich and Paris, sharing a studio and often serving as each other's models. Art historian Carina Reich describes their bond as “based on affection, identification and at times even co-dependence” that “basically excluded the rest of the world” (130), a bond immortalized by Bauck’s The Danish Artist Bertha Wegmann painting a Portrait (National Museum, Stockholm).
She exhibited in France under a different name
Only slightly, adopting the more french sounding name Berthe Vegman, perhaps to echo the French impressionist Berthe Morisot. The informal depiction, untethered brushwork, and keen fascination in variations in light notably evoke the compositions of Berthe Morisot.
She shared an artist supplier with Monet
A palette-shaped stamp on the reverse of a canvas by Wegmann sold at Sotheby’s in 2024 can be traced to Vieille & Troisgros, an artist supplier and colorman operating in Paris between 1879 to 1883, known to be favored by Claude Monet. Identical stamps appears on numerous notable paintings by Monet, such as Étretat: The Beach and the Falaise d’Amont (1885; 1964.204) and The Departure of the Boats, Étretat (1885; 1922.428) at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Wegmann undoubtedly was exposed to Impressionism living in Paris, and synthesized their plein air innovations, interest in capturing the fleeting effects of flickering light,
She was internationally trained
In 1867, following her initial training in Copenhagen, Wegmann trained in Munich under Wilhelm Lindenschmit and E Kurzbauer. After Munich, her cosmopolitan education continued in Paris, where she enrolled at Madame Trélat de Lavigne’s art school for women popular with many Nordic woman artists, and received intermittent tuition from Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jules Bastien-Lepage and Léon Bonnat.
And became a teacher to many famous students herself
By the 1880s, Wegmann had become a teacher herself, and offered instruction to both men and women. Among her pupils were: Hildegard Thorell, Max Andersen and Marie Triepcke (later Krøyer).
She participated in the groundbreaking Copenhagen Woman’s Exhibition of 1895
Championed by suffragist, socialite and author Emma Gad, the Kvindernes Udstilling, or Woman’s Exhibition, of 1895, was held at the Den Frie Udstillings, an artist's association modeled after the Salon de Refuse. Other exhibitors at the landmark included Anna Ancher, Sopgie Holten, Maria Lupleau and the sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielson.
However, Wegmann preferred to exhibit alone
Despite her frequent participation in group exhibitions, particularly with other female artist’s, Wegmann confessed: “I have no great desire to exhibit together with Danish artists in Utrecht[?] I always do better by exhibiting on my own, independently of the others” in a letter to her long-standing patron and close friend, Moses Melchoir, in 1904 (Hirsprung archive).
In 1911, had a solo retrospective also at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (The Free Exhibition), an opportunity rarely offered to woman at the time. An interior sold at Sotheby’s last year, presumably painted in Paris in 1880, is pictured. In 1926, a memorial exhibition was held in Wegmann’s honor in Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.
She had a thing for hands
Recalling her time in Paris in an interview in 1917, Wegmann recounted her visit to Manet’s studio: “I was in Manet’s studio, but at that time he was not as recognized as he was later. He was a great painter, skilled, but it is still not the art I like. … No, I have always stuck to what was in my own, there is a certain opposition in me to the view of others. But I learned a lot from the new appreciation of color.” (From Danish, V. Sv.-P., “Malerinde Frøken Bertha Wegmann.”)
She won Demark’s top medals
Over her five decade long career, Wegmann was decorated with many of Denmark’s highest distinctions. Notably, she was the first woman to hold a chair at the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Art, she received the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1883 and the royal Ingenio et Arti medal in 1892.
She was always on the move
With constant exhibitions in Germany, Copenhagen, Paris and even World Fairs in America, Wegmann was always on the move. Rumor has it she spent so much time traveling she would use her sister or close friend’s addresses.
She did not see herself as a portrait painter
Despite being renowned as a portrait and admitting herself to having painted hundreds, Wegmann refused to be categorized by the label. “Almost every single day, I say no to a portrait commission” she admitted to her pupil and friend, Hildegard Thorell, in 1884, and again the following year: “Portraits, portraits, and always portraits, that’s what kills both one’s soul and one’s art, and that’s what I’ve fought against all winter; ah yes, happy is the one who does not need to paint for money’s sake!” (Bertha Wegmann, letter to Hildegard Thorell, 9.4.1885, Nordiska museet archive).
She also distinguished between society portraits and fire paintings. Wegmann distinguished between commissioned portraits of recognizable figures and figure paintings where “the model served some purpose other than depicting a recognizable individual.” As she explained in 1923: “I always try to get my models to forget themselves, so that the pose does not become conscious. I talk with them about the one they love or the one they care for, and then they forget everything they had dreamt of showing me. Then they become real. Deep inside us all the child dreams, no matter how old, how big, how beautiful or how ugly we are.” (Houmark, Christian. “Bertha Wegmann om Modeller og Portrætter,” Berlingske Tidende (B.T.), 10 February 1923, Statsbiblioteket)
Her best friends returned the favor.
She never married or had children
Wegmann never married, but shared her life with her lifelong partner, the artist Toni Möller, as well as their dog, Fukki. The care all three of them had for each other can be seen in the several existing photographs of them together.
When Fukki died in 1907, Wegmann painted him and spoke about his death in a letter to Moses Melchior, as follows (in Danish): “I know that you think differently and cannot understand my feelings, but remember that he was my faithful companion for over 10 years now…. he looked so sweet lying on his pillow, almost as if he was sleeping, that I painted him.” (Letter from Bertha Wegmann to Moses Melchior, 11.9.1907, The Hirschsprung Collection's archive)
Upon her death, Muller inherited Wegmann’s artworks. In 1941, Müller auctioned them to establish a grant in Wegmann’s name for young women artists.
Women – of all ages – were her most common subject
Art historian Ernst Jonas Bencard has pointed out that approximately 40% of Wegmann’s oeuvre exclusively depicts. (Ernst Jonas Bencard, Pussy Power, p. 102)
“They were her favorite subject, even though she admitted she found them harder to paint than men in an interview in 1923: “The lady perhaps is the harder one. The ladies are the most complex natures, and they usually come at the time when the exterior is beginning to pass, what they keep on dreaming about. And it pains me, for I understand them, and therefore I am fond of them.” (Houmark, Christian. “Bertha Wegmann om Modeller og Portrætter,” Berlingske Tidende (B.T.), 10 February 1923, Statsbiblioteket)
Critics noted she painted her models as they wished to appear: “Miss Wegmann almost always paints her sitters as they might wish to appear – if indeed they understood how to wish as nobly as she paints. (FROM DANISH – Bertha Wegmanns Malerier,” Nationaltidende, 4 March 1911, Statsbiblioteket).
Her portraits of women remain her most enduring legacy.
She painted 8 hours a day every day
Wegmann stuck to this regime until her seventies, when she became ill, and limited herself to around six hours. She died in her studio in Copenhagen in 1926.
“How many hours do you paint in a day?”
“Eight, until I became ill. Now I am always ill, and seventy-six and a half – am I not tired? I keep going, one must. The other is no use.”
(Houmark, Christian. “Bertha Wegmann om Modeller og Portrætter,” Berlingske Tidende (B.T.), 10 February 1923, Statsbiblioteket)
Her work was collected in her lifetime, but fell out of favor in the 20th century
Unlike many female artists of her era, Wegmann received institutional and commercial recognition during her over five-decade long career. Her paintings entered national collections and private homes across Europe, an unusual triumph for a woman artist at the time.
Until her breakthrough work was sold at Sotheby’s in 2016, achieving a price of over $100,000.
