Mr and Mrs COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO. Sketch for Easter Card

Jenny Nyström was a skilful and multitalented artist. At the turn of the 20th century, she gave up portrait painting and concentrated instead on working as an illustrator. She was quick to adopt new fashions and shape her own style, which still retains its power of attraction for today’s public. She was way ahead of her time in feeling free to play with the historical props, motifs and symbolism of traditional painting. In this illustration for the Easter card Mr and Mrs COCK-A-DOODLE-DO, she pokes fun at gender roles of the time and highlights the women’s suffrage movement.

It was not until the 1860s that artists in Europe started to specialise in illustrating children’s books as a separate genre. A greater number of authors, mostly female, started writing for children around 1880. Ottilia Adelborg and Jenny Nyström were pioneers in Sweden, but it took until the 1890s, in part thanks to the popularity of Christmas magazines, for a larger body of children’s illustrators to become active. The printed image now became an industrial product – ranging from volumes of prints and oleographs to advertising, packaging, greetings cards, bookmarks and other small printed items – and the market supported numerous artists.

In the 1890’s, due to a burgeoning patriarchal nationalist ideology in which women’s emancipation was thwarted, female artists of the time were hit by a massive backlash. In Nationalism the middle-class “father” was seen as the protector of the family and the nation, while women were placed in the private sphere. Their right to a professional identity was once again called into question. Applied Arts and children’s illustrations that had formerly been held in high esteem were now associated with the private space and were thus considered as inferior genres in which one would expect women to work. Those who were active in this field found their status in the artistic hierarchy of the time utterly undermined, and this unfortunately remained the case throughout the 20th century. Despite this, children’s book illustrators and cartoonists have managed to create a radical and outstandingly strong picture book tradition in Sweden, a fact that becomes abundantly clear when compared with the work of their international peers.