Becoming artists : self-portraits, friendship images and studio scenes by Nordic women painters in the 1880s

The 1880s were a decade of professionalization, liberation and transnational encounters for women artists from the Nordic countries. Despite structural discrimination, a growing number of women from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden pursued professional careers as artists, studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm or at private art schools. Many of them traveled to Germany or France to train at private ateliers. In the 1880s, Paris was their artistic center, where they built their own networks, exhibited frequently, became sought-after artists and gained critical recognition for their work.
Conducting in-depth analyses of selected paintings, Becoming Artists explores how Nordic women painters represented themselves and one another in their professional roles, how they promoted their work, how they overcame obstacles and inscribed themselves into the visual history of their profession. It highlights the impact of friendship, companionship and collaboration on Nordic women painters self-fashioning in the 1880s and it examines the studio s symbolic meaning as a room of one s own. Drawing extensively on hitherto unpublished archival sources, this study offers new perspectives on artists including Julia Beck, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Asta Nørregaard and Bertha Wegmann.
Carina Rech is an art historian based in Stockholm and Berlin. She is a researcher at Stockholm University and a curator at the art museum Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde. "Becoming Artists" is her doctoral dissertation.