Bertha Wegmann

Bertha Wegmann (1847–1926) was a Danish portrait painter of Swiss ancestry. She was the first woman to hold a chair at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Life When Bertha Wegmann was five years old, her family moved to Copenhagen, where her father became a merchant. He was an art lover and spent much of his spare time painting. She showed an interest in drawing at an early age, but received no formal education until she was nineteen, when she began taking lessons from Frederik Ferdinand Helsted, Heinrich Buntzen and Frederik Christian Lund.

The next year, she returned to Copenhagen, where she was already well-known from works she had been exhibiting at the Charlottenborg Palace since 1873. A portrait of her sister was awarded the Thorvaldsen Medal in 1883.

She continued to exhibit widely and represented Denmark at several world's fairs, including the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

Wegmann died suddenly while at work in her studio.

Selected paintings