This is a study for Friends, the large work painted by Hanna Pauli during the first few years of the 20th century. It depicts a meeting of Stockholm’s cultural elite at the home of Hanna Pauli and her husband Georg on Södermalm in Stockholm. Here the artist has painted two of her friends in the rather bright light from a paraffin lamp, but later in the finished painting she dimmed the light – probably to make the setting more intense and mysterious.