En ung kunstner (Ditlev Blunck) betragter en skitse i et spejl

The young painter in the glass is Ditlev Blunck, and the device is the oldest one in the studio: a mirror lets an artist see his work at a distance and reversed, the way a beholder will meet it. Bendz sets the trick inside a crowded interior, where the clear reflection is itself cut in two and the lines of the room are blocked, so that the picture turns into a question about whether a painter can really see what he is doing. Bendz had been Eckersberg’s pupil, and like several of his generation he gave up the great history paintings the Academy prized for the newer genre painting — modern scenes without a plot, which he filled with complicated compositions and studied effects of light. He showed this canvas in 1826, and the museum’s own account of him places it among the few works of 1826 and 1827 on which his reputation rests; three of the pictures of those two years were bought for the Royal Painting Collection. He died at Vicenza in 1832, on the Italian journey he had been awarded. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).