An exhibition label on the stretcher.

Exhibited: Charlottenborg 1863 no. 259.

Provenance: Bought by Kunstforeningen (The Danish Art Society) and was disposed of by lottery at Kunstforeningen in 1864, here won by merchant F. E. Petersen.

Christiane Schreiber was the daughter of a Danish father and a Norwegian mother and lived as a child in Voss, Bergen and Stavanger in Norway, until she moved to Copenhagen in 1852 and became a student of the painter Jørgen Roed (1808–1888). She subsequently travelled to Düsseldorf, where she was one of the first female painters to be admitted to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Here, she studied in 1854–55 with the German painter Karl Sohn (1805–1867), and she also received instruction from the Norwegian painter Adolph Tidemand (1814–1876), who like so many other Norwegian artists at the time had settled in Düsseldorf. Here, she also met the Swedish painter Sofie Ribbing (1835–1894), who became her life partner. She also continued her education in Paris as a student of Jean-Baptiste-Ange Tissier (1814–1876) in the years 1855–1857 together with a group of other female artists consisting of, among others, Ribbing and the Norwegians Aasta Hansteen (1824–1908) and Marie Aarestrup (1826–1919).

In 1858, together with Hansteen, she became the first female recipient of the Norwegian state's travel grant, and she was therefore able to go on a study trip to Rome. Schreiber exhibited at several Nordic and international exhibitions in the 1850s and 1860s. At the beginning of her career, she mainly painted depictions of Norwegian folk life, but later she also executed genre paintings and especially portraits, and she portrayed, among others, Oscar I King of Norway and Sweden (1799–1859) and his wife Queen Josefine of Leuchtenberg (1807–1876).