Interior of a Studio in Paris

We present today's painting thanks to the Swedish Nationalmuseum, which reopens after some refurbishment on October 13th. :)

Eva Bonnier was one of many Scandinavian women artists who studied and worked in Paris at the turn of the 19th century. She lived there between 1883 and 1889, studying at Académie Colarossi and exhibited in both 1887 and 1888 at the Paris Salon.

This painting, where her brilliant sense of color comes to the fore, shows a corner of the studio she rented in Rue Humboldt in Montparnasse. She herself has said that she made sculpture when she needed a change from painting. Eva Bonnier was mainly a portrait painter but she never portrays herself in the artist role or in her own studio like many of her colleagues. In all her interiors you can’t tell that it’s from her own studio, since she has chosen to turn all the canvases and only show their backsides. Her ambiguous portraits and interiors show how complicated it was for female artists to conform to the male artist’s norm of the period. Finally, her lack of professional identity led her to give up painting in the middle of the 1890’s, dedicating herself, instead to the patronage of the Arts.

P.S. Dear Readers, if you want to know more about women artists, visit our special category on that subject at the DailyArt Magazine.