Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn were two of Sweden’s most famous painters in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Outside Sweden, Larsson is probably still his country’s best-known artist; his watercolours of his house and family have appeared on innumerable posters, stationery and calendars around the world. Known for his engravings and his portraits, Zorn also enjoyed great success in the U.S., where he painted three presidents. Larsson’s and Zorn’s influence is central to Sofie & Cecilia, but it is their wives, Karin Bergoo Larsson and Emma Lamm Zorn, who inspired this novel.
As the Larssons were transformed into Sofie and Nils Olsson, and the Zorns into Cecilia and Lars Vogt, they acquired invented qualities, adventures and relationships large and small. Dates were shifted when it suited the story and the titles of their paintings and books changed. They became, in short, fictional characters.
Another fictional character, Lisbeth Gregorius, has a shadowy connection to Gerda Boethius, Sweden’s first woman art historian and the first director of the Zorn Collections.
Most of the characters with whom Sofie and Cecilia interact are complete fictions, but I have preserved the real names of some historical figures who were important in Swedish society and in the international art world of the time. They include Eva Bonnier, Prince Eugen, Pontus Furstenberg, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Marta Jorgensen, Ellen Key, Selma Lagerlof, John Lavery, George Pauli, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Venny Soldan and Lilli Zickerman.
Zorn in America: A Swedish Impressionist of the Gilded Age, by William and Willow Hagans (Chicago: The Swedish-American Historical Society, 2009) was a rich source of information. Two of Zorn’s letters, translated by the authors, appear in the book as letters from Lars Vogt.
From Per Wastberg’s essay, “The Hirsch Family in Stockholm” in Contemporary Jewish Writing in Sweden, ed. and trans. Peter Stenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), I borrowed many of the details in the Isaksson family wills, as well as the menu of the Hallwyls’ dinner.
The photographic experiments of Dora Helmersen were suggested by those of Hannah Maynard, a nineteenth-century photographer in Victoria, British Columbia. The Magic Box: The Eccentric Genius of Hannah Maynard, by Claire Weissman Wilks (Toronto: Exile Editions, 1980) is a good introduction to her work.
Sofie Olsson’s “discovery” of purple is a version of a story the artist Mary Pratt told Michael Enright when he interviewed her in 2013 on “The Sunday Edition” on CBC Radio.
The painting Cecilia Vogt thinks of in Chapter Twenty-nine, where the frightened Virgin spills her sewing, is “The Annunciation,” by Jan de Beer in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The painting with the woman holding a dead hare in the Wallace Collection in London is “Jochem van Aras with his Wife and Daughter,” by Bartolomeus van der Helst. “The Annunciation of the Virgin’s Death,” by Paulus Bor, is in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.