ArtistNorwegianb.1837–d.1921
Mathilde Dietrichson
0 active items
Born Johanne Mathilde Bonnevie in Christiania (now Oslo) on 12 July 1837, she grew up in Trondheim and Kongsberg before returning to the capital to begin drawing lessons. On the advice of writer Camilla Collett and painter Adolph Tidemand, she left for Düsseldorf in 1857, studying in the studio of Otto Mengelberg until 1861. This made her the first Norwegian woman to receive a formal professional art education abroad, at a time when such a step was highly unusual for any woman.
In Düsseldorf she trained as a genre painter, a specialisation she continued to develop in Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Munich over the following decades. Her genre paintings from the 1860s and 1870s - small, carefully observed scenes of domestic and everyday life - are widely regarded as her most original contribution. In 1862 she married the art historian Lorentz Dietrichson and followed him to Rome, where the couple lived until 1865. The Italian light and landscape left a lasting impression on her palette, visible in later works.
From 1866 to 1876 the family was based in Stockholm, where Dietrichson attended the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. After settling in Christiania in 1876, she continued to travel extensively with her husband - throughout Europe and as far as the Far East - and many of her motifs reflect those journeys. She was one of very few married women of her generation who maintained an active career as a working artist throughout her marriage and into old age.
Dietrichson was prolific to a remarkable degree. A comprehensive retrospective mounted at Blomqvist Kunsthandel in 1922, the year after her death, comprised 245 works. The Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo holds several pieces from her hand, including a Self-Portrait and a portrait of her husband, as well as genre and landscape works acquired across different decades. After her death she gradually faded from the main narrative of Norwegian art history, a common fate for women artists of her period, but an exhibition of 95 works at Blaafarveværket in summer 2020 drew renewed critical attention to her output.
In the auction market, Dietrichson's work appears primarily through Norwegian houses. All 14 items in the Auctionist database have been handled by Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo. Her best-recorded result there is a picture series sold for NOK 1,200,000, with other works such as "Ung mors første besøk hos foreldrene" (1869) and "Letterwriter" achieving NOK 260,000 and NOK 125,000 respectively. The market for her work remains concentrated in Norway, where her historical importance as a pioneer of women's professional art education gives her a distinct place.