Sofie Ribbing

Sofie Ribbing, born in Adelöv in Småland, Sweden on March 6, 1835, died in Kristiania, Norway on December 7, 1894, was the daughter of the district chief Per Arvid Ribbing and Carolina Augusta Ehrencrona. Ribbing began her artistic education in Stockholm in 1850. During the 1850s (some sources indicate the 1860s) she traveled to Düsseldorf where she studied with Karl Ferdinand Sohn. She continued her education in Paris with Jean-Baptiste-Ange Tissier and in Brussels with Louis Gallait. After a period in London, Ribbing lived together with the painter Agnes Börjesson in Rome during the 1870s. Ribbing belongs to the Düsseldorf School, known for its narrative genre pictures or romantic landscapes. She mainly worked with finely tuned portraits but also with floral still lifes and quiet genre motifs such as in Boys Drawing (1864) and Forsaken (1869), both in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. In these works, one can see the influence of Rembrandt, the Düsseldorf School, French painting and Italy. They are characterized by a driven realism, attention to detail and a subtle depiction of light. Boys Drawing radiates a strong intimacy between the older boy and the younger one, who sharpens his pencil while he fascinated onlooks the older boy’s skillful touch. Boys Drawing was praised by the art critic Lorentz Dietrichson in Ny illustrarad tidning in 1866 as “an excellent example of the progress she made under the guidance of the world-famous Gallait”. August Strindberg claimed in Dagens Nyheter in 1877 that the freer painterly aspirations of the French school easily could be discerned in Ribbing’s art, despite her studies for the famous Belgian Gallait. In addition to the Swedish Royal Academy of Art’s exhibitions in Stockholm in 1866, 1870, 1873 and 1877, Ribbing exhibited internationally in Copenhagen in 1872 and 1883 and in the Royal Academy in London. She is represented with a self-portrait in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In the Gothenburg Museum of Art there are four paintings, one of which is a copy of a self-portrait by Rembrandt. In the National Museum in Oslo, she is represented with a portrait and a study head. Kristoffer Arvidsson