Additional texteDescription: Preparations are under way for a name-day party in the drawing room on the artist’s family estate of Brategården in Bråfors in the district of Bergslagen. The room features light furnishings and textiles – 18th-century furniture is combined with older painted wall hangings and modern window dressing. The table is decorated
with meadow flowers and ivy. Brate has above all attracted attention for her domestic interiors from around 1900. A Day of Celebration is her best- known work, reproduced on everything from postcards to coffee tins.
Description: Fanny Brate has become best known for her domestic interiors painted around the turn of the last century. A Day of Celebration is her most widely recognised work and has been reproduced on everything from postcards to coffee tins.
In A Day of Celebration Brate depicts preparations for a name’s day party in a large room at her husband’s family estate, Brategården in Bråfors in the district of Bergslagen. The room features light furniture and textiles. The off-white Gustavian 18th-century furniture is combined here with older-style painted wall hangings and modern window dressing. The table is decorated with meadow flowers and ivy. All the greenery and light of nature appears to have moved indoors. In this work, Brate thus achieves a kind of interior open-air painting.
Exhibition text: This picture of an interior at the artist’s family house, Brategården in the county of Västmanland, looks like it was inspired by Carl Larsson’s watercolours from Sundborn. But the case is the reverse, in some ways. Despite obvious similarities, the interiors in Brate’s paintings are not modern but based on older traditions. It is also known that preserved Gustavian interiors such as that of Brategården provided vital inspiration to Carl and Karin Larsson when they created Sundborn.
