Two girls in the garden

The picture, in portrait format and set in a wooden frame, shows two girls sitting on a garden bench. In the background we see a couple of straight, greenish-brown tree trunks. The taller girl has her arm around the smaller one and her right hand is holding the little one’s left. The scene looks caring. Both have their heads tilted slightly downwards, their gaze expressionless. The two are wearing similar dresses, brown and green, ending just below their knees, and each wears a light-coloured pinafore dress. Hanna Achenbach-Junemann was born in Dortmund in 1892. Between 1914 and 1918, she was one of the few women to study at an art academy, usually a male domain. The artist’s work contains many depictions of the everyday lives of hard-working segments of society, in which children were drawn into daily work from an early age and had to assume responsibility for younger siblings. Time and again, Achenbach-Junemann emphasised protective gestures shown by older siblings and moments of togetherness, as the case here. In 1919, the artist moved to Siegerland with her future husband Hans Achenbach, initially to Obernau, where she worked as a freelance artist. This was likewise rather unusual for a rural area such as the Siegerland in the 1920s. Alongside paintings and drawings, Hanna Achenbach-Junemann also produced prints.