Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, Künstlerin

In the mid-1880s a group of young Nordic women went to Paris to train as artists in studios that finally admitted them, and Hanna Hirsch, a Swede in her early 20s, shared one in Montparnasse with the Finnish painter Venny Soldan. This is her portrait of that friend, and it broke the rules of how a woman was meant to be shown. Soldan sits right on the floor, leaning back, sleeves pushed up and hands working a lump of clay, caught mid-thought rather than posed in proper dress. When it was seen, some called it bohemian and even indecent, a reflection, critics said, of how free these northern women had become abroad. It was accepted at the Paris Salon of 1887 all the same, and a Gothenburg museum bought it in 1911.