Wilhelm Hensel

Wilhelm Hensel was born on 6 July 1794 in the German town of Trebbin, in the present-day state of Brandenburg, to a Protestant preacher.

In 1828, Hensel moved back to Berlin, where he became the royal court painter, and both a professor and member of the Academic Senate.

[1] His activities as an artist were interrupted in 1848, when revolutions broke out all over Germany, and Hensel became an avid advocate of the conservative political parties of the time.

Among his best-known works are Christus in der Wüste (Christ in the Desert), Kaiser Wenzel, Italienische Landleute am antiken Brunnen (Italian Peasants by an Ancient Fountain), and over 1000 drawings of well-known people of the German romantic period.

His wife, Fanny Mendelssohn, and his brother-in-law, Felix Mendelssohn, were both important pianists and composers, but Hensel himself apparently was entirely unmusical: when he participated in the premiere of Felix's Son and Stranger at a private performance honoring the silver anniversary of the Mendelssohn parents in 1826, despite determined prompting he was unable to sing his part of the mayor, even though it comprised only a few bars of the single note F.[2] Hensel's sister, Luise Hensel, was a widely read religious poet.