Frida Hansen (1855–1931) is Norway’s foremost Art Nouveau artist in an international context. Her fame rests on her strikingly innovative and award-winning tapestries, which were lauded and acquired by several major art museums in Europe. She was a controversial figure, however, and was soon forgotten in Norway, before her art was reappraised several decades after her death.

Hansen explored Norway’s forgotten heritage of weaving. Early on, she made plant-dyed tapestries with stylized geometric patterns. After creating her own variant of the traditional warp-weighted loom, Hansen developed her innovative “transparent” technique, whereby the tapestry would include open fields with visible warp threads. She mostly used this technique to make portieres for doorways, with the portieres’ open fields helping connect the rooms visually, a key principle in Art Nouveau architectural theory.

Hansen won a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 for her technique, and it led to her international breakthrough.

The portieres entitled Horse Flowers (1900), executed in the transparent technique, depict the life cycle of stylized dandelions from buds to the planting of their seeds. As one of the hardiest and most common wildflowers in Norway, the dandelion was often use