Self-portrait

Sofie Ribbing painted this in 1865, while she was in Italy, and it entered the Florentine collection of artists' self-portraits that the Medici had begun two centuries earlier. For most of that history the faces on those walls were men's, so a Swedish woman's likeness arriving there marks how slowly the profession was opening to women. She had trained where women were accepted, since the main academies of the day kept their life classes closed to them, and at home she was known for calm genre scenes of children absorbed in drawing and reading. Here she turns that same steady attention on herself, dressed plainly and looking straight out, one of the relatively few women whose self-portrait hangs in that long gallery of painters.