Breakfast Time
A breakfast table laid beneath the trees, with dappled sunlight falling on the white cloth. Hanna Pauli painted the picture in Paris at the age of 23, and it became one of the best-loved works of Swedish plein-air painting.
The light filtering through the foliage fills the white cloth with colour.
Hanna Pauli, née Hirsch, was born in Stockholm in 1864. She studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, which had by then begun to admit women, and afterwards went to Paris, where she studied at the Académie Colarossi. Breakfast Time was painted in 1887 during her time in Paris, when she was 23. That same year she married the artist Georg Pauli. She came from a wealthy Jewish family that supported her artistic training.
The picture shows a breakfast table laid beneath trees in a garden. The white cloth is covered in dappled sunlight, patches of light filtering down through the leaves. The table is set with china and glass that catch the light. The whole scene is everyday and still, yet full of light. The shadows of the trees fall in patterns across the cloth and the ground.
The real subject of the picture is light. The dappled sunlight makes the white cloth shimmer in yellow, blue and violet. The shadows are not black but coloured. Hanna Pauli painted with light, airy brushstrokes and a bright palette, showing how light transforms everything it touches. In this way the white cloth becomes the most colourful surface in the picture. The painting is full of life, though it has no drama.
The picture belongs to plein-air painting, which was very popular among Swedish artists in France in the 1880s. They wanted to paint outdoors, in daylight, and capture the mood of a particular moment. The influence of the French Impressionists and of plein-air painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage was considerable. In Paris and in the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing, many Nordic artists gathered to paint in this way.
Hanna Pauli was one of several women artists who made their breakthrough in the 1880s. She belonged to the circle around the Opponents and the new generation of Swedish artists. Being a woman artist was still difficult, and many stopped painting after they married. Hanna Pauli, however, carried on and became an admired portrait painter. She painted throughout her life and was active for more than fifty years.
Among her later works are a well-known portrait of the writer Ellen Key and the large group portrait Friends, which shows a circle of artists and intellectuals in her home. She and Georg Pauli were central figures in Stockholm’s cultural life, and their home became a meeting place for artists and writers.
Breakfast Time is now in the collection of the Nationalmuseum. It is one of the best-loved pictures in Swedish painting of the 1880s, and is often reproduced as an example of how light became the new protagonist of art in the late 19th century. It has been shown in many exhibitions on Nordic artists in France and on women artists in 19th-century Sweden.