Hanna Hirsch-Pauli
Swedish, 1864 – 1940
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Hanna Hirsch, later Hanna Pauli, was a Swedish painter; primarily of genre scenes and portraits.
Hanna Hirsch was a daughter of music publisher Abraham Hirsch. She was a friend of Eva Bonnier, and they followed each other through the painting school of August Malmström, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Hanna Hirsch studied in Paris from 1885 until 1887 at the Académie Colarossi, and shared a studio with Bonnier for part of that 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 artist 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.
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 tablecloth 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.
In 1887 she married the painter Georg Pauli and travelled with him to Italy for a year.
