PAULI, Hanna - b. 1864 Stockholm, d. 1940 Solna

Hanna Pauli (née Hanna Hirsch) was a Swedish painter. She was a daughter of music publisher Abraham Hirsch. She began her artistic career at the August-Malström school of painting for children in Stockholm. From 1881 to 1885 she studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. From 1885 until 1887 she attended courses at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She had her portrait of the Finnish sculptress Venny Soldan (now in the Gothenburg Art Museum) accepted to the Paris Salon in 1887. The portrait is realistic and unconventional for its time in portraying a female artist at work (sitting on the floor with clay in her hands) rather than in proper bourgeois attire. She was influenced by Manet and Bastien-Lepage, her free brushwork owes much to her study of French plein-air technique.

In 1887 she married the painter Georg Pauli (1855-1935) and settled in Stockholm. She became famous as a portrait painter, but from the 1890s she also painted genre pictures and landscapes.

Breakfast

This painting may have been inspired by Monet’s The Luncheon. Both pictures feature a laid table with garden seat and chairs in the shade. In Monet’s, lunch has just been finished and the table left; in Pauli’s, breakfast is about to begin. The central motif in both paintings is the laid table and the white cloth, while the figures make an incidental impression and serve merely to amplify the narrative content.