Maria Ricci was married to the artist Carl Gustaf Plagemann and served as the model for sensual Italian women in some of his paintings. Emma Ekwall’s portrait, by contrast, shows her as a respectable middle-class woman in a theatre box. Ekwall was only 21 when she painted it and had yet to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Despite her youth, her composition demonstrates a refined use of colour, dominated by white, red and black, with a few accents of gold.