What a difference a year makes. In August, 2024, I visited Bestumhus, the residence and studio built for Frida Hansen in 1903. I was the guest of Frida’s great-grandsons, Dag Minsaas, Finn Levy, and Jan Levy. Tove Solbakken, an enthusiastic historian with the Oslo Cultural Preservation Office [Byantikvariet], has been investigating the house for historical preservation purposes, and she was part of the basement to attic tour.
The home is still owned in the family, and Frida Hansen’s presence fills the rooms. A photo on the wall shows where her loom stood on the light-filled first floor.
The basement held evidence of dyeing; both color on the walls and a dyepot burner.
I sat at Frida Hansen’s desk.
Many of Frida Hansen’s watercolor sketches and full-sized cartoons were deposited with the Nasjonalmuseet decades ago. The new house investigation has revealed many more! In 2024, there were many partial process sketches, and even sections of full-sized cartoons, stashed away. Frida’s relatives and Tove were just beginning to account for these new treasures coming to light when I came to visit Bestumhus for the first time. Many had been pulled out to investigate; others remained in a roll in an attic corner.
We even saw Frida Hansen’s drawing board in the attic, with ghostly traces of patterns and words.
When I visited Bestumhus in September this year, I was happy that I explored all the rooms last year, because I was now privileged to look through the sketches and watercolors. Since my last visit, curators at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Vibece Salthe and Inger M. Lund Gudmundson, came to Bestumhus to show some love and care for the precious papers. They carefully unrolled them, placed acid-free paper between them, and stored them in four large folders. The curators borrowed more than a hundred sketches for further examination at the museum. Several were included in the exhibit this past summer at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Fra Røttene: Kitty Kielland & Frida Hansen.
Each of the four sets of remaining sketches required two people to move them from their under-the-bed storage. I spent more than two hours leafing through the sketches.
Frida Hansen took a study tour to Paris and Cologne i 1895, and many of her realistic drawings from that period are in the files. She is clearly skilled in figure drawing, but I found those sketches less captivating for my research than her textile cartoons and sketches for tapestries and transparencies.
I mentioned that many of Frida Hansen’s watercolors and cartoons are preserved by the Nasjonalmuseet. Those materials and these additional sketches from Bestumhus are valuable research documents for a number of reasons.
Sometimes the colors of preliminary watercolors are stronger than the faded colors of her woven work. It’s an unfortunate fact that textiles are inherently fragile. In several of Frida Hansen’s weavings, a century of sun and chemical changes have made the colors fade. The sketches and watercolors remind us of the vibrancy of Frida Hansen’s intentions. Compare the watercolor in the Nasjonalmuseet with a woven version from a private collection in Oslo.
Sometimes sketches, watercolors, and early photos are the only evidence of her art works that remain. This is an image of Hansen’s very early tapestry, Havfruer og Svaner [Mermaids and Swans], 1893, from the collection of the Nasjonalmuseet. Read more about this missing tapestry, sold to a Californian in 1893, and then please find it for me! “Mermaids and Swans: Another Missing Frida Hansen Tapestry.”
It’s interesting when a sketch is really just that — an idea captured before all of the work of creating a final cartoon and tapestry with fully-developed details. This color sketch of Sørover (Southward) was discovered at Bestumhus. The loosely-drawn border of the watercolor on paper includes the idea of seaweed. In contrast, the finished tapestry borders are filled with detailed, almost botanical representations of sea life.
The huge tapestry that resulted from the sketch had a deep American history of exhibitionn in the early 20th century, was lost for 90 years, and then was found in dusty, but otherwise pristine condition. A miracle! And then when it was displayed at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, the sketch was available as well. The museum is raising money to keep Southward in Norway – contact them if you can help!
Frida Hansen was an excellent record-keeper, so her biographer, Anniken Thue, was able to compile an excellent and comprehensive Ouvre Katalog listing her known works. The new trove of sketches includes images that aren’t shown in the catalog, that represent ideas that were never completed or woven. It is clear which of her sketches were intended to be woven with open warp, because she draws in the tiny stripes of warp.
This won’t be the last post about the joy of examining these Frida Hansen treasures!