Ulrika Pasch
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Ulrika Fredrica Pasch , called Ulla Pasch (1735-1796), was a swedish painter, one of few female artists known in Scandinavia before the 19th century.
She was born in an artistic family, daughter of the painter Lorenz Pash the Older, and sister of the future painter Lorenz Pasch the Younger.
In the 1750s, when her brother was studying abroad, her fathers career declined severely, and Ulrika was forced to become a housekeeper in the home of her maternal aunts widower. Her uncle however allowed her to spend a lot of time developing her artisticall talent, and from 1756, she had became an professional portrait painter and was able to support her father and sister in this way; after her fathers death, she lived with her sister and set up her own studio.
When her brother returned to Sweden in 1766, she had been an artist for ten years and her clientel had mowed from the middle class to the upper classes and the aristocraty. Ulrika Pasch and her brother then worked together as professionall artists, shared their studio and guided each other in their work; their collaboration was one of mutual respect and harmony, and she is knowed to have helped him painting the textiles and costumes, a work he found tiring.
Ulrika Pasch was as a person humble, and never considered her work to be much more then a way of supporting herself, but she continued to work until her death and she optined great success; from the late 1760s, she was often emploid by the court, painting portraits of the members of the royal family, and in 1773, she was elected to the Swedish roayl academy of arts, although she never recieved a pension from the crown despite repeated apeals.
Ulrika Pasch is the most succesfull female artist in Sweden and perhaps also the rest of Scandinavia (counting the artist who was actually working in this countrys) before the 19th century, and she is also, together with Margareta Capsia (1682-1759) and Helena Arnell, one of very few professionall female artists in Scandinavia before the 19th century.
