Object Type: Painting

Medium and Support: oil on canvas

Credit Line: Florence Griswold Museum: Gift of Jane Hattstaedt Waters, Grand-niece of John Christen Johansen

Accession Number: 2021.22

A young girl in a blue dress seated on a stool sews a piece of cloth. A doll lays in a box on the table in front of her and another doll rests on the floor. An adult woman, also wearing a blue dress, sits in the background and sews.

The canvas by Danish-American portraitist John Christen Johansen was donated to the Museum by the artist’s grandniece. Earlier in its life it was a wedding gift from Johansen to his niece (the donor’s mother), who is depicted in the foreground of "In the Sewing Room" along with the donor’s grandmother (in the background). The picture had hung above the mantelpiece in the family’s home along with several photographs of the next generation of mothers and daughters posing with it over time.

The painting’s rich tonality and expressive brushwork allude to the artist’s early training with Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati. Johansen honed his professional skills while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Académie Julian, and James McNeil Whistler’s Académie Carmen in Paris. He returned to Chicago to build his reputation as a portrait painter, and later lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, New York, and New Canaan, Connecticut. The donor remembers visiting the artist, her uncle, at the National Arts Club in New York City where he worked in an impressive studio.