Interior,

ca. 1870

Trained in Munich, Wegmann became the most celebrated portraitist in Denmark, but she painted a variety of subjects, including landscapes, still lifes,and interiors. Here she reimagined the motif of light streaming through a window—a hallmark of Scandinavian painting—by placing it in a dark, utilitarian room with a washtub and a large cloth hanging over a woodburning stove. Compared to Alfred Stevens’s The Psyché (My Studio), hanging nearby, and Wegmann’s later paintings of her own studio, this interior is a humbler space of day-to-day domestic tasks that nonetheless adopts some characteristic features of studio scenes: the oblique perspective on a corner, the chair angled toward the viewer, the scattered evidence of work. Wegmann asks us to consider this hardworking interior as a worthy subject of art, on par with more colorful, playful spaces of artistic creation.

Bridget Alsdorf, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Comparative image: Bertha Wegmann, View from the Artist’s Studio toward the Marble Church, early 20th century. Oil on cardboard, laid on Masonite; 210.8 x 137.2 cm. Museum purchase, Carl Otto von Keinbusch Jr. Memorial Collection Fund (2023-118)