Hanna Hirsch-Pauli

Who was Hanna Hirsch-Pauli?

Hanna Hirsch, later Hanna Pauli was a Swedish painter.

Hanna Hirsch was a daughter of music publisher Abraham Hirsch. She was a friend of Eva Bonnier, and they followed each other through the painting school of August Malmström, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm. Hanna Hirsch studied in Paris from 1885 until 1887 and shared studio with Bonnier for part of that time. She had her portrait of the Finnish sculptor Venny Soldan accepted to the Paris Salon in 1887. The portrait is realistic and unconventional for its time in portraying a female artist at work rather than in proper bourgeois attire.

As was the case with most other Swedish artists of her generation, her painting stood closer to the French juste milieu painters than to the most impressionists; nevertheless, the thickly applied paint she used to show specs of light on the white table cloth on her 1887 painting Frukostdags provoked one critic to comment that she had probably used the cloth to clean her brushes.

In 1887 she married the painter Georg Pauli and traveled with him to Italy for a year.