Reflection in Blue

Painted, in the museum’s own words, from a realistic perspective that places the viewer in the same room as the person in the bed, it belongs to the convalescent pictures that were a popular theme in Nordic art around 1900 — a body of images the museum reads as an emblem of female fragility, and, in this painter’s hands, as a challenge to that reading. Eva Bonnier was the daughter of the publisher Albert Bonnier, a member of the Artists’ Association, and by the judgement of her country’s reference works one of the foremost Swedish women artists of the later nineteenth century; she began her studies in 1875 in August Malmström’s painting school, worked in Paris, and showed at the Paris Salon of 1889 and at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She painted this canvas in Paris in 1887. The museum holds her housekeeper portrait of 1890 as well, and it received this picture in 1910 as a gift from the publisher Karl Otto Bonnier and his family — the brother who had taken over their father’s house. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.