Thorvald Bindesbøll was born in 1846 as son of Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll, the architect of Thorvaldsen's Museum in Copenhagen. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1861 to 1876. And while studying here, Bindesbøll received his first independent architectural commission in 1874. In 1882 he managed to win the Academy's small gold medal, and in the same year he successfully applied for a travel scholarship to Northern Germany, the Netherlands and Northern Italy. Disappointment awaited him on his return home, however, because there were no architect assignments to get. As a result, Bindesbøll had to seek other outlets for his creative talents. He threw himself into all the many facets of crafts and design.
 
From the early 1880's Bindesbøll became seriously engaged in working with ceramics. Initially, he was closely tied to Italian patterns decorated in the Classical style. Gradually, however, he was able to shed this influence and replace it by Far Eastern sources, and he then moved on to develop his own personal form of non-figurative art.
 
As time went on, Bindesbøll was to try out all aspects of the decorative arts, and all materials used: embroidery patterns for his sisters, bookbindings, furniture and artistic metalwork, and ceramics. From 1898, he designed silverware for A. Michelsen in Copenhagen, and from 1904 for Holger Kyster in Kolding. Silverware gradually replaced pottery within his range of work. However, it is a distinctive feature of all his work that he paid scant regard to the actual nature of the material he was working with at the time. For Bindesbøll it was the form and decoration that mastered the material, not vice versa.
 
1900 was a year of triumph for Bindesbøll. This year he received full, official recognition in Denmark, when he was given responsibility for the preparation of the Danish section for craft and design at the World Exhibition in Paris, where he also displayed ceramics and silver of his own design. It was in his capacity as commissioner for the exhibition, however, that he was awarded a gold medal. His contemporaries were not yet ready to observe and recognise the genius in his artistic work.
 
In Denmark, the break with previous historical traditions and the Classical styles has been designated the Skønvirke period, and is generally considered to reach from 1880 to 1920. It corresponds to the English Arts & Crafts Movement, the German Jugendstil and the French Art Nouveau. Just as was the case outside Denmark, Skønvirke was a reaction to the growing supply of cheap and poorly worked mass-produced goods that industrialisation made possible.
 
Assessments of Bindesbøll's significance have varied over the years, but his talent and impact has always been recognised. From his contemporaries he experienced rather negative reactions. In 1900 a critic, a fellow architect, wrote: ”Thorvald Bindesbøll occupies a unique position among Danish architects. Regardless of whether this is justified or not, he is perhaps the most renowned of them all, and certainly the one most talked about. He has created a field for himself within crafts and design, a field that is his domain alone, and his excremental ornamental work has set root in people's general awareness. To what extent he is really called to serve as the person to be the salt in Danish decorative art must remain unresolved, but the honour of having provided fresh fertiliser for its growth cannot be taken from him. He has a powerful, original talent”. Another critic warned visitors to the World Exhibition against believing that the Bindesbøll ”doodles”, in any way made him representative of contemporary Danish art.
 
In 1941, the director of the Danish Museum of Decorative Art characterised Bindesbøll's efforts: ”In the revival of design and crafts that followed the writing of Ruskin and the work of Morris, ….. the work of Thorvald Bindesbøll figures as Denmark's greatest artistic effort. He was the man who most strongly and most artistically fully understood what it was all about, and who brought the greatest talent to bear on dealing with the new assignments”.

Posterity has fully backed this assessment. Professor Nikolaus Pevsner calls Bindesbøll ”the most original ceramic artist of his generation” and continues that “his bold abstract decoration places him in a class apart from every other artist in Europe at the time”.
                     
Bindesbøll drew his inspirations from a number of sources. His father and his artist friends had brought an awareness of the decorative arts of Antiquity back home from Rome. The wall-paintings from Pompeii provided motifs in their decorative works, while the black-and-white mosaic floors did not win a place in their art. It was Thorvald Bindesbøll instead who took up this source of inspiration in his black-and-white style. He had an intimate knowledge of later European art and the tracery of leaves from the Renaissance and the powerful relief effects and characteristic types of ornament from the late Baroque are all recognisable in many of Bindesbøll's pieces of silverware and on his furniture.
 
Other writers have focused on unfurling fern buds as the source of inspiration for one of Bindesbøll's favourite motifs. The curled and rolled-up leaves that have a distinct resemblance to an ornament featured on an old Japanese sword decoration now in the Danish Museum of Decorative Art. Bindesbøll transformed this motif into the cloud ornaments so characteristic of his work, the “doodles”. It was in fact at the very end of the nineteenth century that Oriental art became a significant source of renewal in European decorative art. The almost over-exaggerated naturalism of the Art Nouveau artists was clearly inspired by Japanese art and, although Bindesbøll only seldom employed naturalism as a form of expression, the Japanese inspiration is clear in works such as the vase with the large, foaming wave at Koldinghus. This was probably inspired by a woodcut by Hokusai (1760-1849) showing the Fuji-san volcano and the Great Wave off Kanagawa. There are other examples, too, including a number of pieces of silverware, where individual cloud ornaments have been carefully and meticulously placed on smooth silver surfaces, such as a tea caddy in Koldinghus. Bindesbøll also made use of inspiration from Persian art, particularly as regards ways to fill out a base, a trend that moved in a different direction from the Japanese.
 
Regardless of the sources of his inspiration, Bindesbøll was not, however, an artist who merely copied the original source. He distilled the essence from what he had seen, and used it to create his own particular abstract style.