A pair of carved white marble urns on pedestals 20th century 152cm high Bertel Thorvaldsen, Thorvaldsen also spelled Thorwaldsen, 19 Nov., 1770, 24 March 1844, was a sculptor, prominent in the Neoclassical period, who was the first internationally acclaimed Danish artist. Prominent in Roman intellectual and artistic circles, he influenced many emerging artists from Europe and the United States. The son of an Icelandic wood-carver who had settled in Denmark, he studied at the Copenhagen Academy and won a travelling scholarship to Rome, where he was to live most of his life. In Italy the prevailing enthusiasm for classicalâ sculpture fired his imagination so much that he later celebrated the date of his arrival in 1797 as his “Roman birthday.  The success of Thorvaldsen’s model for a statue of Jason (1803) attracted the attention of the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova and launched Thorvaldsen on one of the most successful careers of the 19th century. In Rome, Thorvaldsen made a name for himself as a sculptor. Maintaining a large workshop in the city, he worked in a heroicâ neo-classicist style. His patrons resided all over Europe. When he returned to visit Copenhagen in 1819, his progress through Europe, in Berlin,