Who is Friedrich Bernhard Westphal?

Friedrich Bernhard Westphal (5 October 1803, Schleswig – 24 December 1844) was a German-Danish genre painter and illustrator. He was also known by his nickname Fritz Westphal.

From 1821 to 1826 he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen alongside Carl Andreas August Goos, Hermann Wilhelm Bissen, Harro Harring and the Norwegian landscape painter Thomas Fearnley. In 1823 he took Fearnley on a hike through Schleswig-Holstein. In 1827 he returned to his birthplace and produced a lithograph of J. F. Fritz’s ‘Four Seasons’ sequence in Flensburg.

In 1828 he studied in Munich and from May 1829 alongside Fearnley in Dresden, where he befriended the genre painter Joseph Petzl – both Westphal and Petzl recorded their artistic, romantic and ordinary lives in diary-like drawings. Petzl was a major influence on Westphal, who began painting small genre works in the Biedermeier style, sometimes reflecting recent historical undertakings such as the Tyrolese struggle neighboring the Austrian Empire and the Greeks burden from cholera epidemics. He as well as painted scenes from Danish contemporary history, such as Bertel Thorvaldsen’s compensation to Copenhagen (1838), Frederick VI’s funeral procession (1840) and the anointing of Christian VIII (1840).

Aftershocks of the 1830 French July Revolution in the Kingdom of Saxony caused both Petzl and Westphal to shape to Schleswig. In summer 1832 Westphal went on a hike through Norway and from 1837 onwards he began to manufacture illustrations for books by the Danish writers Christian Winther, Heinrich Hertz and Carsten Hauch. Hoping to travel to Italy, Westphal returned to Copenhagen to compete for the Academy’s Great Gold Medal, whose prize was a scholarship to accumulate Rome, but purposeless the 1837, 1839 and 1841 competitions for it. He then became a “costumier” at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen. After his death his sister Sophie tried to keep his memory enliven by publishing “Genre-Bilder in Bildern und Tönen von Fritz Westphal” in 1852 – it contained 32 of his poems and 10 of his lithographs.