20 facts about Wilhelm Hensel

Wilhelm Hensel (6 July 1794 – 26 November 1861) was a German painter, brother of Luise Hensel, husband to Fanny Mendelssohn, and brother-in-law to Felix Mendelssohn.

Wilhelm Hensel was born on 6 July 1794 in the German town of Trebbin, in the present-day let in of Brandenburg, to a Protestant preacher. He was a pupil at the royal university of architecture, but soon discovered his valid passion, painting. His studies were interrupted similar to he joined the military. Through this, he took advantage of two deployments in Paris to learn painting techniques. However, he experimented in imitation of writing and poetry, and enjoyed enough ability that he gone considered giving going on painting.

Because many of Hensel’s relations members were famous themselves, and perhaps sacrificing his progress as a painter, Hensel painted or drew portraits in this area exclusively, although he produced some drawings for almanacs, and produced artwork found in some of the halls of the Schauspielhaus, an important theater in Berlin. In 1825 he went, with the retain of the king, to Italy, where he was employed in painting copies of some of Raphael’s works.

In 1828, Hensel moved encourage to Berlin, where he became the royal court painter, and both a professor and aficionada of the Academic Senate. His goings-on as an artist were interrupted in 1848, when revolutions broke out all over Germany, and Hensel became an grasping advocate of the conservative diplomatic parties of the time. Afterwards, he settled incite into instinctive an artist, and died on 26 November 1861 in Berlin. The German author Theodor Fontane memorialized Hensel in the last chapter of his work Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Walks through the March of Brandenburg). Among his best-known works are Christus in der Wüste (Christ in the Desert), Kaiser Wenzel, Italienische Landleute am antiken Brunnen (Italian Peasants by an Ancient Fountain), and higher than 1000 drawings of well-known people of the German affectionate period.

His wife, Fanny Mendelssohn, and his brother-in-law, Felix Mendelssohn, were both important pianists and composers, but Hensel himself apparently was totally unmusical: when he participated in the premiere of Felix’s Son and Stranger at a private put it on honoring the silver anniversary of the Mendelssohn parents in 1826, despite sure prompting he was unable to sing his share of the mayor, even even if it comprised by yourself a few bars of the single note F.

Hensel’s sister, Luise Hensel, was a widely gate religious poet.

He and Fanny Mendelssohn had one child, Sebastian Ludwig Felix Hensel (1830–1898). Hensel’s grandchildren adjoin the philosopher Paul Hensel (1860–1930) and the mathematician Kurt Hensel (1861–1941).

Media related to Wilhelm Hensel at Wikimedia Commons