I visited my friend Nanne Stølmacher for dinner in Oslo last fall. Her friend and fabulous weaver, Inger Anne Utvåg, was not able to join us, but she sent over a set of transparent tapestry portieres in Frida Hansen’s wool transparent tapestry technique for us to examine.
Later, while going through my binder of unidentified transparency photos, I found the same bird. The photos below were in the files of Therese Solbakken. The format of the images looks like a posting from the Blomqvist auction house, but Therese had not kept the reference, and I was not able to find it online either. It was likely posted several years ago.
Nonetheless, it is always fun to find a match in my photo collection of 20th century transparent tapestries in Frida Hansen’s technique. Will I be able to find out who made this design?
One of the reasons I write posts with photos is that I believe crowdsourcing—and now AI image searches—can help. Perhaps someone out there will recognize a transparent tapestry made or designed by an ancestor in their family and discover my photo of a similar piece. Perhaps someone has seen this pattern before and can tell me the name of the designer, or of a clever weaver who created her own interpretation of it. One can hope!
One of the biggest breakthroughs in my research on the provenance of Frida Hansen’s Sørover (Southward) tapestry happened only because I had published articles about my search. I knew the tapestry had disappeared from public view in the 1930s and had been purchased by an antique dealer and stored away a couple of decades ago. But where had it been in the meantime? Had the owner, Berthea Aske Bergh, kept it until her death?
Yes. The cousin of Bergh’s son’s wife read my article and sent me records showing the tapestry was sold at auction. You can read the full story here: “Frida Hansen’s Southward: More Provenance Puzzle Pieces are in Place, and all my Southward articles here.
So maybe this striped-breast bird will lead somewhere too.