Fanny Brate has become best known for her domestic interiors painted around the turn of the last century. A Day of Celebration is her most widely recognised work and has been reproduced on everything from postcards to coffee tins.
In A Day of Celebration Brate depicts preparations for a name’s day party in a large room at her husband’s family estate, Brategården in Bråfors in the district of Bergslagen. The room features light furniture and textiles. The off-white Gustavian 18th-century furniture is combined here with older-style painted wall hangings and modern window dressing. The table is decorated with meadow flowers and ivy. All the greenery and light of nature appears to have moved indoors. In this work, Brate thus achieves a kind of interior open-air painting.
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