Search instructions
View alphabetical lists of all artists who are either Scottish or whose works are associated with Scotland currently featured on the site.
Select the initial of the artist's name that you are looking for. Scroll down the list until you find the name, and select it for more information about the artist and his or her work.
Search Tip
Artists are organised by their most commonly-used names. This is usually but not always their surname.
Search results
- Bertel Thorvaldsen
- Sir Walter Scott, 1771 - 1832. Novelist
- 1833/34
- PG 2933
- On Display
- Scottish Art
Bertel Thorvaldsen (Danish, 1770 - 1844)
Thorvaldsen, the son of a wood carver, showed an early talent for drawing and was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, aged eleven. In 1796 he set off for Rome where he was to remain until 1838. He was praised by the great Italian neoclassical sculptor Canova and excelled at producing marble figures from classical mythology. He also sculpted portrait busts and panels in low relief. Thorvaldsen left his collections - comprising the plaster models for his sculptures, and paintings, drawings and antiquities - to the Danish people. Thorvaldsens Museum, built to display these collections, opened in 1848 as the first public museum in Denmark.
