He assisted the literary critic Clemens Petersen and also befriended the Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson for a while, leading in 1870 to a collection of articles he published as Konst og Æsthetik (Art and Esthetics).

[1] In 1883, he followed Julius Lange as secretary of the Royal Danish Academy and also became the institution's librarian, a position he maintained for the rest of his life.

However, he is remembered above all for his work on the first and second series of Denmark's biographical dictionary of artists and architects known as Weilbachs Kunstnerleksikon, first published in 1877–1878[3] and again in 1896–1897.

[4] These solid works are based on rich background material as well as on archival sources and include personal contributions from artists who were still living at the time.

March 900), daughter of merchant and consul in Helsingør Carl Frederik August Dreyer (1820-1904) and Juliane Louise Wilhelmine Becker (1825-1900).