8. VICTORIA WESTBERG. Tree and water, oil on canvas attached to Board, 40 x 53 cm.

VICTORIA WESTBERG 1859-1941 Trees and water Signed Victoria Westberg. Oil on canvas attached to Board, 40 x 53 cm.

PROVENANCE The Hansson Family Collection, Uppsala Included in the themed auction Women artists International Women's Day 8 March.

Victoria Westberg has been described as "a distinct individualist on the basis of bohemianism". She was born in Malmö in 1859. As her father was a frame manufacturer, she already came into contact with the art and its practitioners early on. Unlike most of her peers, she did not receive her main artistic training in Stockholm or Paris. Admittedly, she studied for a while with Edvard Perséus and John Kindborg, but she received her main education in Rome, where she studied for two periods, 1892-93 and 1896-97, with the famous professor Cavalini Filiberto Petiti. Victoria Westberg was also active as an artist in the USA for a couple of years, something that was hardly common among her colleagues either.

From the 1890s and a couple of decades later, she belonged to a tone-setting artist coterie together with, among others, Per Ekström and the architect Ragnar Östberg, and for years she shared a painter's umbrella with Ekström on Öland.