Swedish artist Eva Bonnier accompanied Hanna Hirsch to Paris in 1883.* Bonnier was primarily a painter; but like my characters, Amy Richardson and Sonja Borealska, she practiced sculpture in clay. I love how this painting by Bonnier captures the liveliness I have ascribed to Sonja's work, and the way it illustrates clay sculpture in a studio devoted primarily to painting (notice the stretched canvas against the wall).
A portrait of Bonnier by Richard Bergh captures the strength of her hands.
*Margaret H. McFadden includes the pair in a partial listing of the hundred or more Scandinavian women who went to Paris to study art in the 1880's (Appendix F, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999), pp. 211212
A portrait of Bonnier by Richard Bergh captures the strength of her hands.
*Margaret H. McFadden includes the pair in a partial listing of the hundred or more Scandinavian women who went to Paris to study art in the 1880's (Appendix F, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999), pp. 211212