Background
Hanna Hirsch was born on January 13, 1864 in Stockholm, Sweden. She was the eighth child of music publisher Abraham Hirsch and Pauline Meyerson.
Hanna Hirsch was born on January 13, 1864 in Stockholm, Sweden. She was the eighth child of music publisher Abraham Hirsch and Pauline Meyerson.
She studied at the painting school of August Malmström, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Hanna then studied in Paris from 1885 until 1887 at the Academie Colarossi.
She shared a studio with Eva Bonnier for part of the time. While working in Paris, she formed a number of close friendships with other women artists from the Nordic countries. She had her portrait of the Finnish sculptor 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. The casual informality of Soldan's expression and pose were "interpreted as reflecting the liberated lifestyle of Nordic women in Paris at the time" and the portrait was also considered indecent and denounced as bohemian.
She exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.
As was the case with most other Swedish artists of her generation, her painting stood closer to the French juste milieu painters than to most impressionists; nevertheless, the thickly applied paint she used to show specks of light on the white table cloth on her 1887 painting Frukostdags (Breakfast Time) (in Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) provoked one critic to comment that she had probably used the cloth to clean her brushes.
Her lifetime production was sparse and mostly consisting of portraits, painting artists and writers from her and her husband's circle of friends, such as the one of painter Karl Nordström (1890; in the Bonnier portrait collection, Nedre Manilla, Stockholm), writer Verner von Heidenstam as Hans Alienus (one of his literary characters, 1896), writer Selma Lagerlöf (1932, Nationalmuseum) and the group portrait Vänner (Friends, 1907, Nationalmuseum) showing writer Ellen Key reading to a group in the home of the Pauli family.
A Bavarian Peasant Girl
1885The Friends of Ellen Key
1900Princess with a spindle
Reading aloud
Untitled
Still life with raven
1885The Farm
1887The girl at the window
The old house. Betty reading
1907Portrait of a young girl
Margret
1889Breakfast time
1887George Pauli
1910Gerda
1891Verner von Heidenstam as Hans Alienus
1896Painter
Venny Soldan-Brofeldt
1887In 1887 she married the painter Georg Pauli and travelled with him to Italy for a year.