Additional texteDescription: To this day, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli’s painting Breakfast - Time from 1887 is still able to trigger feelings of intense sensual pleasure from our visitors. “We truly feel invited; it is just like our very own breakfast ritual. The chairs are waiting for us and we can almost feel how the heavy teapot tilts as we lift it.” The table which is laid with beautiful objects gives associations to family life and domesticity. The image shows a corner of reality, where the bourgeois dining room has been removed to the garden.
This is an open-air painting suffused with light. The subject is dappled with reflections that give the objects a suggestive shimmer. It is a juste-milieu painting, being at once anchored in the classicist tradition with its linear perspective, but also inspired by the way the Impressionists depicted light with colour. Like many Swedish artists at the time, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli studied in Paris and exhibited at the Salon.
The use of light, the lively brushstrokes and the thickly applied paint outraged several Swedish critics at the time. They saw her technique as “slipshod” and one critic meant that the flecks of light on the table cloth were probably the result of the artist “wiping” her own brushes on it. In the late 1880s Breakfast - Time played a major role in Hanna Hirsch-Pauli’s breakthrough as an artist. Already an accomplished colourist, as we can see, she went on to develop those skills in her portrait painting.
Exhibition text: To this day, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli’s painting is still able to trigger feelings of intense sensual pleasure. However, the lively brushstrokes and the thickly applied paint outraged several Swedish critics when the picture was exhibited at the end of the 19th century. The critics saw the technique as “slipshod” and one critic meant that the flecks of light on the table cloth were probably the result of the artist “wiping” her own brushes on it.
Description: Hanna Pauli painted Breakfast-Time in the Stockholm archipelago in the summer of 1887. The light is vibrantly portrayed as it reflects off the objects on the breakfast table. As in contemporary French art, shadows are painted with the transient colours in which they appeared. Hanna Pauli studied art in the 1880s in Paris, where she had discovered this style of painting. The summer season is conveyed by the warm, slightly hazy
Exhibition text: A dappled light filters through the foliage, imparting an evocative shimmer to the objects before us. The laid table, full of beautiful things, evokes thoughts of middle-class family life and domesticity. Hanna Pauli had recently studied in Paris and had work accepted for the 1887 Salon. A Swedish critic, however, considered her technique too modern, and assumed that the patches of light on the tablecloth were a result of the artist “wiping her brushes on it”
