Hanna Pauli
The portrait painter among the Opponents.
Hanna Pauli painted portraits of friends such as Verner von Heidenstam and Ellen Key. Her Breakfast Time is one of the best-loved works of Swedish plein-air painting.
Hanna Pauli was born Hanna Hirsch in 1864 in Stockholm. She came from a wealthy Jewish family and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1880s. In 1885 she travelled to Paris with her friend Eva Bonnier and studied at the Académie Colarossi.
In Paris in 1887 she painted Breakfast Time, a breakfast table in a garden where flecks of sunlight dance over the white cloth and the china. The picture received mixed reviews when it was shown, as it was considered carelessly painted. Today it is one of the best-loved pictures of Swedish plein-air painting and hangs in the Nationalmuseum. The same year she married the painter Georg Pauli.
She belonged to the circle of the Opponents and became above all a skilful portrait painter. She painted her friends, among them the poet Verner von Heidenstam, the Finnish artist Venny Soldan and the writer Ellen Key. The portraits are lively and personal, and she caught people at ease in everyday life rather than in official poses.
Her largest work is Friends, on which she worked for many years and which was completed in 1907. It shows Ellen Key reading aloud to a circle of cultural figures by lamplight. The painting is in the Nationalmuseum and is a document of Stockholm’s cultural life around the turn of the century.
Hanna and Georg Pauli had children, and family life took up much of her time. Even so, she continued to paint and took an active part in the art world. She died in 1940. Today she is regarded as one of the most important Swedish women artists of the generation of the 1880s.