ESTER HENNING (1887-1985): Landscape with motifs of sun and trees, monogram signed E. H, crayon, 1940s.

Approx. 39x45 cm HISTORY: Ester Henning's fate is undeniably one of the most touching in Swedish art history. A very poor upbringing meant that she already had to leave home at the age of twelve and start working as a nanny.
Her aptitude for drawing was noticed and encouraged by a matron in one of the homes where she worked. From 1900 to 1911 Ester lived in Mora and there has been much speculation about the influence that Zorn may have had on her artistic dreams. Anyway, in 1911 she went to Stockholm, where various jobs were interspersed with four semesters of sporadic studies at the Technical School. During her studies, she had shown the greatest interest in figure modeling and it was also within this art form that Ester was noticed in an article in Idun in 1915 with the title "From automatic dishwasher to sculpture rice. Ester Henning and her art". The article shows the great hardships she had to endure at the various workplaces. However, the situation would become even worse. Unemployed and poor, Ester is arrested on April 17, 1916 at Riddarhustorget for "violence committed against constable Jansson". The following day, she is taken to Katarina hospital "for mental illness", as the police report states. She is diagnosed with Dementia praecox, what we call schizophrenia today. Thus began a life in various mental hospitals, which, with a few interruptions, would last until the artist's death in 1985, aged 97.
The strange thing happens, however, that this broken-down woman in an anything but inspiring prison environment will create art that belongs to our country's most fascinating and poignant. Everything happens thanks to the curator Janny-Lisa Clason, who when she was hired at Beckomberga in 1936 was told by the staff about how Ester had tried to draw with a piece of charcoal on toilet paper and how she had mashed flower petals between her fingers and drawn with the plant mass on the underside of the chair seats. The far-sighted curator makes sure that Ester gets crayons and paper. This provides the conditions for the artist to really start creating.
For obvious reasons, Ester Henning's world of motifs is limited to the environment within the walls of the hospital. A large part of her production depicts views of Beckomberga's barracks-like pavilions. The occasional floral motif also appears. However, it is in the depictions of fellow patients that she creates her most interesting works. Most of the portraits were added without the model's knowledge. Ester used to sit in a corner of the day room and for a long time observe and study the other patients, and then with her crayons hastily attach someone's features to the paper. The portraits were often a fusion of current characteristics and memory remnants from previous encounters with the depicted. Not least, there is an impression of the artist's own emotional state in these works. For Ester, the portraits meant something deeper than just depiction. The special relationship she had with her portraits meant that she was initially reluctant to let outsiders see them.
The artist's fast and expressive way of working gives the portraits a striking nerve. They almost seem to vibrate with a life force, which overturns the usual image of mental patients as broken down to body and soul. Perhaps Ester saw her own indomitable power in her fellow patients as well, or she had it transferred to them in the portraits. With their dense bursts of lines, these images give associations to the feverish paintings that Sigrid Hjertén creates during her last active years.
When Ester does her portraits, one of her fellow patients at Beckomberga's ward 22 is precisely Sigrid Hjertén. The relationship between the two artists was strained. Sigrid, who did not paint during this period, found it difficult to accept that others were engaged in painting and Ester was not slow to defend herself. "The ladies were at war with each other" so that for a time they had to be separated.