Very little is known of the Danish landscape draughtsman, painter and lithographer Carl Ludvig Ferdinand Messmann. In 1840, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (the Kunstakadamiet) in Copenhagen, where he remained until January 1845. He also trained as a lithographer at the Copenhagen lithography workshop Em. Bærentzen & Co. Among Messmann’s favoured subjects were the countryside in and around the Danish capital.

He often worked in the Frederiksberg Gardens and the forest of Charlottenlund, on the shores of the Øresund north of Copenhagen, as well as elsewhere in North Zealand, producing drawings, nature studies and lithographs imbued with a romantic sensibility and an appreciation of nat...