Sofie Ribbing

Her best-known picture shows two boys bent over a sheet of paper, one drawing, the other watching, in the plain daylight of an ordinary room. Sofie Ribbing painted Boys Drawing in 1864, and it drew wide attention at the Scandinavian exhibition in Stockholm two years later, where a Gothenburg art society bought it for a record price.

Ribbing came from a Swedish noble family and trained at a time when the academies still kept their life-drawing rooms closed to women. She studied in Stockholm, then at the Düsseldorf Academy in Germany under Karl Ferdinand Sohn, and later in Paris and Brussels. Düsseldorf had taught her the careful, storytelling realism of everyday life, and she settled into portraits and quiet domestic scenes.

She kept working in that vein for decades, dividing her life between Sweden and long stays abroad, and died in 1894. Boys Drawing still hangs in the Gothenburg Museum of Art.