Louis Welden Hawkins

Louis Welden Hawkins made the frame of his portrait of Séverine himself, and it carries a message. Séverine, born Caroline Rémy, was a campaigning journalist known for taking the side of the poor, and the frame spells out her causes with olive branches and the word PAX, peace, on one side, and ears of wheat and the word PANIS, bread, on the other. She later gave the painting to the French national museums, and it is now in the Musée d'Orsay.

Hawkins was born in Stuttgart in 1849 to English parents and settled in France around 1870, eventually taking French nationality. He moved from academic training through the rural naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage to a quiet, dreamlike Symbolism, and in the 1890s he showed at the Salon de la Rose+Croix, the mystical exhibitions of the Symbolist painters in Paris.