Rose Laying the Table
Astrid Holm (1876–1937)
1914
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- height 97.7 cm, width 79 cm, height 115.7 cm, width 96.9 cm
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
This painting is a rare example in the SMK collection of an artistic representation of a Black West Indian woman painted on site in the early twentieth century. It was done on the island of St. Thomas, which until 1917 was part of the Danish colony in the Caribbean (now the US Virgin Islands). According to the title, the figure in the painting is a person named Rose. Recent research has tried in vain to identify the model. She was presumably a local woman whom Astrid Holm hired to pose for her. Holm spent six months on St. Thomas in 1914. Prior to that, she lived in Paris for several years, where she became associated with the French painter Henri Matisse’s art school. Matisse was known for his pictures of women arranging fruit and flowers and for decorative arrangements of objects from French colonies in North Africa. These greatly influenced several younger painters of the period. In that sense, Rose Laying the Table is simultaneously a testament to life on St. Thomas and a personal take on a familiar motif within European modernism (50 Favorites in the SMK Collection).
