Hanna Hirsch-Pauli

In 1887 a Swedish painter in her early twenties sent a portrait to the Paris Salon that broke the rules of how a woman was supposed to be shown. Hanna Hirsch had come to Paris two years earlier to study at the Académie Colarossi, one of the few academies that let women draw from the live model, and she shared a Montparnasse studio with the Finnish artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, a friend her own age.

Her portrait of Venny shows her seated on the floor, sleeves pushed up, a lump of modelling clay in her hands, a working artist caught mid-work. Respectable women were usually painted upright and in their best dress, so this directness unsettled some viewers at home, and it is exactly what keeps the picture alive now, in the Gothenburg Museum of Art.

The same year she painted Breakfast Time, a sunlit outdoor table with light falling through leaves onto glass and silver. It became her breakthrough in the Nordic art world and hangs today in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, which bought it in 1910. Back in Sweden she married the painter Georg Pauli and took his name, and much of her later life went to portraits and large decorative commissions.