Eva Bonnier

Eva Bonnier
Porträttfotograf, Public domain

The Opponent and benefactor.

Eva Bonnier painted portraits and interiors and was one of the Opponents. She donated money for public art in Stockholm.

Eva Bonnier was born in 1857 in Stockholm, the daughter of the publisher Albert Bonnier. The family belonged to the city’s cultural elite, and she was able to train as an artist. She studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and in the 1880s travelled to Paris with her friend Hanna Hirsch, later Pauli.

In Paris she was influenced by modern, light-filled plein-air painting. She painted portraits of friends and family and interiors filled with light. The pictures are intimate and understated, and she was particularly skilled at rendering the way daylight falls into a room.

Bonnier was one of the Opponents and signed the protest against the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1885. She moved in the same circle as Hanna Pauli, Ernst Josephson and Richard Bergh. After the 1890s her artistic output declined, and she devoted herself more to her family and to supporting others.

She died in 1909. In her will she left a large sum of money to the City of Stockholm to pay for art in public spaces. The fund, administered by the Eva Bonnier Donation Committee, has since financed many sculptures and decorative works in Stockholm.

For a long time she was best known as a benefactor. In recent years her own painting has received renewed attention as part of Swedish art of the 1880s.