Anna Seekamp, the Artist's Sister

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Artist: Bertha Wegmann (Danish, 1846–1926)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 109 × 100.5 cm
Museum: SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
Rights: Public Domain Mark

The woman takes a short break from knitting and lets her fingers play with a thread from the skein of yarn. She looks directly at the viewer with a curious, trusting look. This portrait of the artist’s sister, Anna, is suffused by a sense of closeness and intimacy rooted in the close personal relationship between painter and sitter. The painting was shown at the prestigious Salon in Paris in 1882, where the jury awarded Bertha Wegmann a medal; an honour bestowed on few women artists at the time.

The accolade was well deserved: this portrait was clearly painted by an artist who knows how to incorporate a figure into the space, and who fully masters the tools offered by the portrait genre. It is a brilliantly virtuoso portrait. Most of all, it fully complies with the era’s penchant for situational portraits: unconventional snapshots that combine profound characterisation with the fleeting and immediate (50 Favorites in the SMK Collection).