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Informal 1860s portrait of an unknown family with three children

Stockholm City Museum (Stadsmuseet) · Södermalm

City Faces

Now showing11 March 2026 – 28 February 2027·Free

Historical portraits, biographical records and facial recognition bring Stockholm's 19th-century faces, from maids to wholesalers, back to life.

Hildur Larsson half-lies across a polar bear, posed like an odalisque in Frans G Klemming's studio at Hamngatan 38. She married the wholesaler Rikard Slöör in 1899, at 18. Many of the faces around her had no name until this project.

The museum holds 400,000 studio portraits from 1860 to 1930: maids, wholesalers, factory workers, sailors. Researchers from the museum, the City Archives and Stockholm and Uppsala universities digitised 40,000 of them and used purpose-built facial recognition to match faces to the Rotemansarkivet, the city's old population register. The show is what came out: who these people were, and how the same camera served both self-presentation and control. Somewhere in here, says producer Anna Seidevall Byström, you might find your historical twin.

Read the captions, because each portrait comes with the life the researchers traced. It's free, on floor 0, with its own step-free entrance by lift ramp (225 kg max). Wednesdays run to 20:00 outside the Christmas period, and the museum runs public guided tours.

Look for

  • Hildur Larsson on the polar bear

    Look for the future Mrs Slöör stretched across a polar bear skin like an odalisque, shot in Klemming's Hamngatan studio.

  • Herr Arbman and his dog

    Around 1865, in fashionable checked trousers and bushy sideburns, he holds a cane, the status symbol of the day.

  • Karl Elmblad with notebook and pen

    A boy posed with his writing book and pen, who grew up to work as a clerk and bookkeeper.

  • The unknown family with three children

    A mid-1860s portrait with the woman on the man's knee and her arm around him, far looser than the posed family pictures of the time.

Good for

  • Cheap Culture
  • Nerding Out
  • Rainy Days

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