Exhibited: The Nivaagaard Collection, “Venskabsportrætter fra Rom”, 2016, Cat. No. 15, mentioned p. 15 and p. 33, ill. p. 33.

Provenance: Circolo Scandinavo / Skandinavisk Forening i Rom (Inv. No. AI 37).

August Krafft was born in Altona and attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1816 to 1819. Here, he became very close friends with several other artists from the Danish duchies, including Ernst Meyer (1797–1861), Johan Bravo (1797–1876), Harro Haring (1798–1870), and the sculptor Herman Wilhelm Bissen (1798–1868), all of whom he sought out again when he arrived in Rome on 11 December 1826 after several years in Altona, Dresden, Munich, and Vienna.

The present portrait presumably originates from Munich, where Theodor Bülau studied history painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, and where both Bülau and Krafft stayed in 1823 and became friends. In this very sensitive portrait of the friend with his long 'Nazarene' hair, Bülau shows his great skills and sensibility as a draftsman, and we get a very fine and vivid impression of Krafft and his vulnerability, as described in the catalogue “Venskabsportrætter fra Rom” (in Danish): “With his gentle and self-sacrificing being, Krafft was the soul of the circle of friends. The friends' correspondence testifies to tenderness, veneration and concern. Krafft's health had been weak since childhood. Even before his stay in Munich he contracted tuberculosis.” (p. 33).

Johan Bravo found Krafft dead in Rome in December 1829 - only 31 years old - and almost the entire German artist colony attended the funeral.

Theodor Bülau later concentrated almost exclusively on architecture, until the tasks slowly ebbed away, and in the late 1840s he mainly had to support himself as a drawing teacher. Most of his surviving drawings and studies were lost during the bombing of Hamburg during World War II (1939–1945).