In 1937, because of her Jewish background, Lotte Laserstein was forced to emigrate from Germany to Sweden, where she was to remain. Her works at that time were close in style to Neue Sachlichkeit. In her portrait of her older fellow artist and friend Elsa Celsing, from the beginning of the 1950s, she worked in a more painterly manner. Celsing is shown at work. She wears a painter’s smock and has her right arm raised, presumably to put brush to canvas.