Boys drawing

Sofie Ribbing trained in an age when the serious art academies still would not fully admit women, so like many Swedish women of her generation she studied privately and abroad, in the German town of Dusseldorf and later in Rome. She finished this scene of two boys bent over their drawing in 1864. There is no drama in it, just the concentration of children absorbed in making marks on paper, and that plainness is exactly why it stuck. When it was shown at a Scandinavian exhibition in Stockholm two years later it drew a crowd, and a Gothenburg art society paid a notable sum to keep it. Sweden later chose it to represent the country in a pan-European gathering of art, one of only a few hundred works picked from the whole continent.