Having won the Great Grand Prize for painting awarded by the Royal Danish Academy in 1809, the Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783-1853) set out from Copenhagen the following year with Rome as his ultimate destination.
He spent three years in Paris along the way, including one year as a pupil of the foremost European painter of the era, Jacques-Louis David.
Eckersberg was arguably David's most important foreign follower.
Absorbing both his austere Neoclassical idealism and his admonition never to stray from nature, the master's teachings prepared him for Rome as well as his subsequent career as a mentor to younger painters.
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