Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  With best wishes,

  Sofie Olsson

  Cecilia sent a prompt answer. Probably she does everything promptly, Sofie thought as she extracted the letter from the mailbox. The baby was fussy, so she had taken him out for some fresh air while she walked up the road to the box. The wind blew in his face, which made him laugh, while she read Cecilia’s letter.

  Siljevik, 17 June 1901

  Dear Mrs. Olsson,

  How delightful it was to have you and your family here, although the day sped by too fast. You are a lucky woman to have so many healthy, spirited children.

  Yes, I agree, we knew very little of life—although we thought we did—when we embarked on the vast sea of matrimony. I could never have dreamed of the satisfaction I have had sharing my life with Lars, watching him receive acclaim here and abroad and, of course, taking up our projects at home.

  Please come again soon. Next time, I’ll teach you another braiding pattern, one I like called “Moon and Stars.”

  Cordially yours,

  Cecilia Vogt

  Sofie folded the thick, smart letter paper back into the envelope, away from the baby’s sticky grasp. She’s telling me to keep my distance, she thought. No doubt I was stepping too close to delicate ground.

  Chapter One

  1882–1887

  WHEN SOFIE FALKNER entered the Academy of Fine Arts in 1882, it was fewer than twenty years since women had first been admitted to the school. That fact did not interest her particularly. She couldn’t have said what did interest her—probably colour and line and trying to get the right amount of shade and light in a drawing. No doubt her parents, so harmonious, so laissez-faire as to what she and her two younger sisters did, encouraged her dreamy side. There was nothing she needed to fight against or for, she had everything she wanted. So she drifted across life, content, silent for long periods, absorbed in her own fancies, like one of those insects who skim just above the surface of the lake.

  Hallsberg, where the Falkners lived, was a little town with an enormous train station. Mr. Falkner went further, describing it as a railroad junction with a town loosely tacked on. Trains came late to Sweden, but by 1862 the western line between Stockholm and Gothenburg, a journey of fourteen hours, was finished. Hallsberg was midway between the two cities, and people began to say that you had to go to Hallsberg to get anywhere. The Falkner girls played and learned their lessons and ate and slept to the hollow, regretful sound of train whistles. Sofie always heard an apology in their hooting, “I’m-sorry-but-I-must-do-this, I’m-sorry-but-I-must-do-this.”

  The Falkners enjoyed their own company, so they spent most of their time in their house on Vastra Storgatan. The house was dim and full of hiding places. Everything in it aspired to the sculptural, from the pressed-wood chairs with their bas-relief arabesques to the repoussé brass plant pots to the massive carved breakfronts and credenzas that supported columns, pilasters, rosebuds and birds perpetually in flight. Nothing was content with a flat surface, everything was three-dimensional. The chairs were upholstered with cut velvet, and even the walls were covered with embossed leather.

  Since their parents made very few rules, the daughters invented their own. Strict, arbitrary laws determined when the pocket doors between the main reception rooms could be opened and closed, what borders and diamonds in the parquet floors could never be stepped upon or calamity would follow, who could lift the purple brocade cushion off the window seat in the parlour and open the secret compartment underneath it, and under what circumstances the tiny, unlit room off the kitchen that held the brawny black safe could be entered. Later, people talked about those old-fashioned houses as glum and forbidding, but the Falkner girls colonized every cranny and dark corner.

  They took piano lessons, singing lessons and, for one year when a dancing master lived in Hallsberg, dancing. But Sofie’s favourite time was Wednesday afternoon, when Mr. Lindstrom came to the house to teach drawing and watercolour painting. He was a large, loosely knit man who was always perspiring. Sometimes he absent-mindedly picked up a painting rag, rather than his handkerchief, to blot his forehead and spent the rest of the lesson with a blue or green gash across his face. The girls kept their composure by not looking at each other when that happened.

  Mr. Lindstrom would arrange apples, pears and a jug on a table in the old nursery, or a broken chunk of bread, a triangle of cheese and a glass, and the girls would set to work. On a spring day, Sofie would look out at the garden and wonder how the hydrangea climbing the stone wall could be translated onto paper, but they never worked out of doors or painted anything live. When Mr. Lindstrom inspected their work, he would stand in silence and after a while he would say, “I see. I see. I see.” It was as if they were painting a secret, and his job was to discover it.

  Her father wished, mildly, that Sofie would apply herself more to the piano.

  “That’s something you can do all your life,” he told her. “You can have all your children around the piano, singing while you accompany them. Or you can play duets.”

  But when Sofie was meant to be practicing, she kept a little pad of paper on the piano bench. The pad filled up with sketches of Miss Ivarsson, the piano teacher, her sisters and her cat, Mus. Of the three girls, Margareta played well, but Miss Ivarsson sighed over the other two. Martina was a tomboy and sat down at the piano with scraped forearms and knuckles and blackened fingernails.

  “Wrong notes, or dirty nails. Not both,” Miss Ivarsson ordered in vain.

  Sofie’s nails were clean, and she concentrated on Czerny’s exercises or Schubert’s songs to a certain extent, but her pad of paper called to her in a way the piano never did.

  * * *

  —

  Life in Hallsberg was pleasant. No one spoke in anger and the house was full of the smells of comfort—gaslights, wood burning in porcelain stoves, cloves, almonds and cardamom, the damp earth that gave minimal life to the rustly, odourless ferns in their jardinières, furniture polish. In truth, there was too much furniture polish, because they had one maid too many. Mamma was too soft-hearted to let poor Mina go, so Mina, who was a little slow, endlessly dusted and then polished the columns and festoons and cherubs that weighed down the furniture.

  When Sofie graduated from the local high school, to everyone’s surprise she wanted something that could not be had in Hallsberg. She wanted to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. It was the only time that anyone remembered her taking a stand.

  Her father was baffled.

  “Sofie, your pictures are charming,” he said. “Mr. Lindstrom tells me you have a gift, especially in your flower paintings. And all that will make your home, your married home I mean, attractive. But tell me why”—gently pleating his brow—“you would want to go to Stockholm to study art. I’ve never heard of a woman painter. I mean, a professional painter, not one who paints on china or does watercolours.”

  “Yes, you have, Pappa. Amalia Lindegren.”

  “Amalia Lindegren.” He thought for a minute. “Is she the one who paints those sad children? Peasant cottages?”

  “Yes. And Mr. Lindstrom told me she is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. But that’s not the point. I don’t know if I want to be a painter, in the way that you are a businessman. I just know I want to learn how to paint. It’s all I want to do.”

  Her father looked at Sofie as if to say: From one of your sisters, I might have expected something like this. But from you, no. She returned his look, levelly.

  “But where would you live in Stockholm? How would you get there?”

  So. If he was worrying about practicalities, it was going to be all right. Mr. Lindstrom had murmured something about “life classes” perhaps being a problem for her father. She was unclear what life classes were, and perhaps her father was too. Apparently he was not going to raise the issue.

  “Pappa, you’re always telling us we live at the crossroads of Sweden. I would take the train, of course. And there are families near the school w
ho rent out rooms to female students.”

  * * *

  —

  When Sofie arrived at the Academy in September, she was directed past the studios and lecture halls on the main floor, up to the third floor and then to the back of the building. Making her way up the stairs at the same time was a wiry young woman who seemed to know where she was going. Out of breath from the climb, she introduced herself as Hanna Hirsch. Interpreting Sofie’s tentative smile as a question about their destination, she explained, in short bursts, that the women had been given their own enclave in the school to placate the instructors and male students who had protested their admission in the 1860s. Their presence would lower standards, they had claimed, water down the curriculum and make the school a byword for amateurism. To guard against those dangers and preserve the virtue of the women, they were isolated as much as possible.

  The segregation was so complete that Nils always claimed he never knew the female department’s exact location in the Academy’s crumbling old buildings. “I only gathered its general direction,” he told Sofie later, “from the constant aroma of coffee. The word was that you poor women studied as diligently as we men were diligently lazy and absent.”

  Perhaps it was true that Nils hadn’t known where the women worked. Or perhaps that was his way of saying that they were nothing to him, since he, too, disapproved of women studying art.

  The coffee that fuelled the women’s work may have been strong, but their course of studies had a hole at its centre. The missing part was the “life class” that had embarrassed Sofie’s teacher, Mr. Lindstrom. Since the goal of every serious painter was large historical subjects, mastering human anatomy through nude models was essential. The male students started by copying engravings, then drawing arrangements of wooden blocks, then copying plaster casts of statues from Greece and Rome and ending up in the Life School, where they drew nude models, often in classical poses. Even for the men, an ease with studying nudes was relatively recent at the Academy. A plump, pear-shaped janitor still working there in Nils’s day had served as a “female” nude when the students had only been allowed male models and back views. By the time Nils was a student, female models and front views were common, but the students still occasionally tormented Emil, the janitor, by pretending that the model of the day was ill, and that he must leave his mop and hurry to the life class.

  For the female students, life classes were out of the question.

  To the end of his life, Nils remained angry about the shoddy teaching, atrocious conditions and outmoded standards at the Academy. Although as a student she understood less about the old-fashioned standards, Sofie also realized that in its vastly more self-satisfied way the Academy was almost as limited as Mr. Lindstrom’s teaching. But for her it was enough to spend her days with paints, easels and colleagues who were happy to discuss how the sun could light one particular shrub, apparently deliberately, while everything around it remained in the shade. Then—the more interesting question—how to paint that convincingly.

  After classes the students went out to supper at one of the cheap restaurants around the Academy. Over pea soup and pancakes, they argued about the eighteenth-century engravers, their own Tessin versus his more famous French contemporaries, the new French vogue for painting out of doors (unheard of at the Academy) and the relative merits of their teachers. Sofie lived in Ostermalm, which was a longish tram ride away from the Academy, at the house of her mother’s cousin, whom she called Aunt Eugenia. Her parents had made that a condition of her going to Stockholm, but Sofie returned to Ostermalm only after supper.

  People who wore their hearts on their sleeves interested Sofie, as well as people who knew, quickly and sharply, how they felt. Opinionated and keenly critical of herself as well as others, Hanna Hirsch, who had climbed the stairs with her on the first day of classes, became a friend. In her final year, Hanna’s teachers encouraged her to enter the historical competition. The competition subject that year was “Luther burns the papal bull at the Wittenberg square”—a typical challenge involving antique buildings, crowds, a few important personages (“showing as much leg or at least as much stocking as possible,” Hanna said darkly) and the triumph of Protestantism. She had hardly begun when she realized, as she told Sofie, that she could not go on with “such rubbish.” Hanna did win another, less important award for her own choice of subject, a lamp-lit study of her mother and sister, but the faculty considered her a malcontent.

  Sofie managed to evade the big historical subjects, and Professor Malmstrom did not press her. He was kindly but took no particular interest in her work. That did not surprise her, nor even particularly disappoint her. She kept on, like Hanna, painting small, domestic scenes—her sisters chasing each other in the garden, her father winding the curvaceous Dalarna clock that stood in the front hall, poor Mina dusting the clothes press in the master bedroom, her arms extending across its great breadth in a clumsy, one-sided embrace. When the Impressionists’ liking for such subjects reached Sweden, Sofie and Hanna joked that they had been in the vanguard. And yet, even when she chose her own subjects, Sofie was not quite satisfied. There was some other way she wanted to paint, or some other subject, but she did not know what it was.

  * * *

  —

  Sofie’s parents wanted her to come home after she graduated, but she was not ready to return to Hallsberg. She compromised by continuing to live at Aunt Eugenia’s, while she shared a drafty studio above a bakery with Helena Jolin. She and Helena had studied together at the Academy, and it was through Helena that she met Nils Olsson.

  The Jolins were giving a dance at their house on Kungsgatan, and Sofie stood in the drawing room at the beginning of the evening with Helena’s father. The room was crowded like an obstacle course with ottomans, plant stands and tiny side tables. A ginger-haired man made his way easily through these hindrances, as if he were a habitué of such places, and shook hands with Mr. Jolin.

  “Sofie, my dear, this is Mr. Olsson. Olsson, Miss Falkner.”

  She knew Nils Olsson by reputation as a successful illustrator for periodicals and books who had lived in France. The Jolins probably thought him a presentable example of their daughter’s artistic leanings. He looked merry, even slightly mocking, but Sofie could see he missed nothing. Only a very slight rigidity of the neck gave him away, if you were watching closely.

  She and Mr. Olsson sat together between two dances. Her dress was the colour of a blush, if a blush could be worried into endless ruches and bypasses and gathers and then gift-wrapped strategically in black velvet ribbons. She thought it was beautiful. Her arms, which were good, were bare from her wrist-length gloves to the short puffed sleeves. She sat very erect, holding a nosegay of camellias. Between her tightly laced corset and her padded and poufed bustle, there was no allowance for relaxing. Mr. Olsson asked her, without a great deal of interest, “Were you at school with Miss Jolin?”

  “No,” she said, “that is, yes. We were not at high school together, but at the Academy.”

  He winced, as if he had a sore tooth and she had touched it. “Horrible, wasn’t it?”

  She was used to critical art students, but his rancour, especially some years after he had graduated, seemed extreme.

  “I loved it,” she said, telling the simple truth.

  Either he didn’t have the energy to set her straight or he didn’t think it would be worth his while. As if he were obliged to follow a worn-out formula, he asked, “And what are you doing now?”

  She explained about the studio she shared with Helena over the bakery. She added, “Helena and I worry that we will never be able to paint again without the combined smell of yeast, warm rolls and turpentine.” Mr. Olsson gave no indication that he found that amusing.

  It seemed quite normal to Sofie that she had little to say to an accomplished man seven years her senior but, afterwards, Nils would never tell the story to the children without mentioning that he’d had to suppress his yawns until they got up to dance, e
ach with another partner. He usually added, “Not a single fibre in me was vibrating.”

  Helena’s mother disagreed with Nils’s impression. “That Sofie Falkner is not like everybody else,” she said to him later, at supper. “There may be weeks when she doesn’t say one word, but then she’ll suddenly open her beak and she always says something that is sound, right, witty or even funny.”

  Nils would make that part of the story too, but Sofie thought Mrs. Jolin’s opinion was an exaggeration, in both directions. She was neither so silent, nor so witty.

  They met again, a few weeks later, in Jakobsbergsgatan. Sofie had been riding in the Djurgarden, and was just leaving Andersson’s Livery, dressed in her riding habit.

  She said, “Good afternoon.” Nils did not recognize her, so she told him her name, and he remembered. He seemed to be in a better mood. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and parted, but he had already changed his mind about Sofie. She was more interesting, he would say, wearing her tall hat and holding a whip than in her pink ball dress.

  “Especially holding the whip,” she would add.

  Chapter Two

  1887–1889

  AFTER SOFIE HAD shared the studio with Helena for a winter, her parents agreed that she could spend a year painting in France. She settled in the village of Grez-sur-Loing, a place she found rather sad, although it was popular with British, American and Scandinavian artists. The Loing was a sluggish tributary of the Seine, southeast of Paris. Grez had two inns willing to lodge artists and a romantic, many-arched bridge. Other than that, there was nothing picturesque about it, which suited the painting style of the day.

  Even in Grez, the women did not study painting with the men. Sofie and two other Scandinavian women, Emma Dahlberg from Bergen and Dorotea Jonasen from Copenhagen, worked with Monsieur Lavartin. When Dorotea lost her way in a painting, she pressed the small of her back, as if it ached. “It’s not my back,” she would say, “it’s my so-called talent.” Dorotea was engaged to be married, and Monsieur Lavartin gave her a set of dishes as a wedding present. His note suggested that before she left Grez for the wedding in Copenhagen she should take her brushes and paintbox down to the river, and launch them out on the water. Because, he wrote, as a married woman she would no longer wish to be an artist, but a housewife. He had praised her draftsmanship; he had seemed genuinely impressed by her work. But a married woman, he repeated, as if no one would dispute this, would not wish to be an artist.