Mathilde Dietrichson

Johanne Mathilde Bonnevie was born in Christiania on 12 July 1837. Her father, Honoratus Bonnevie, was a civil servant and later mayor, and her mother was Sophie Augusta Baumann. She took the name Dietrichson when she married Lorentz Dietrichson in 1862.

She learned to draw early and studied in Düsseldorf from 1857 to 1861, where Adolph Tidemand encouraged her. Women were not admitted to the academy, so she was taught privately by the portrait painter Otto Mengelberg. From 1866 to 1871 she studied in the women’s department of the Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and in 1875–77 she was in Paris and Munich.

She mostly painted genre scenes and portraits, often of women and children, in a warm and often humorous style. She exhibited in Stockholm, Copenhagen and at the world exhibition in Paris in 1878, which became the high point of her career. In the 1880s she exhibited a few times at the Autumn Exhibition, but then stopped. Her husband had suggested that she put art aside for the sake of the family. She traveled with him on study trips and illustrated his memoirs.

The National Museum in Oslo holds several of her paintings, among them the 1890 self-portrait used here and the 1863 portrait of Lorentz. Oslo Museum and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm also hold works by her. Together with Lorentz she gave 60,000 kroner in 1907 to a fund for art historical research. She died in Kristiania on 28 November 1921. Their daughter Honoria (1863–1934) became a physician.