Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938 Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938
Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938 Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938
About Elsa Hogner-Reuterswärd (1886-1987)

Elsa grew up in Sweden, the daughter of a successful government surgeon who took his family off to Boston in the early 1890s. The young Elsa was educated there, spending three years at the Boston Conservatory of Music from 1903.  Marriage in 1907 took her back to Sweden where she studied at the Royal Academy of Arts before embarking on a career as a professional painter and portraitist.  Her later work is pretty inconsequential but her rare paintings from the 1920s and 30s are very strong, evidenced by her portrait of her niece Hjördis in the Swedish National Museum, Stockholm.

Society Portrait, signed and dated 1938

£4,250

Somehow portraits of women by women artists of the early twentieth century have a certain historical frisson. When this was painted in 1938, the Great War had been over for two decades and the societal changes it wrought had led to political and social freedoms that would have been unthinkable to many women at the turn of the century. Elsa would have known a world of corsets and stays in 1880s Boston, a lifetime away from the simple black evening dress of this confident young sitter. The simplicity of the clothes and the assurity of her poise and gaze convey her wealth and social status, an ensemble that wouldn’t look out of place in a cocktail bar today. Perhaps minus the fur. The fabulous pendant cross is tantalizing, as such an important jewel must be recognizable to some family historian somewhere and so unlocking the sitter’s identity. Until then she remains an anonymous sitter, but a fabulous decorative portrait of the 1930s that would perfect any interior of the period.

About Elsa Hogner-Reuterswärd (1886-1987)

Elsa grew up in Sweden, the daughter of a successful government surgeon who took his family off to Boston in the early 1890s. The young Elsa was educated there, spending three years at the Boston Conservatory of Music from 1903.  Marriage in 1907 took her back to Sweden where she studied at the Royal Academy of Arts before embarking on a career as a professional painter and portraitist.  Her later work is pretty inconsequential but her rare paintings from the 1920s and 30s are very strong, evidenced by her portrait of her niece Hjördis in the Swedish National Museum, Stockholm.