The Ten Largest, on the floor

You are Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, a naval officer's daughter. You trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, graduating in 1887, and you make your living from landscapes, portraits and illustration. In the late 1880s the Academy gives you a place in its studio building on Hamngatan, in the centre of the city.

Since 1896 you have met every week with four other women: Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson. You call yourselves The Five. At your séances you receive messages from spirits you call the High Ones, and you write everything down. You also practise drawing automatically, letting the hand move without planning.

In 1904, at a séance, you are told that you will be given a commission: paintings for a temple.

On 1 January 1906 a spirit the group calls Amaliel gives you the task, according to the notes Åke Fant studied. The work is to be mediumistic: you are to be passive. In November you begin The Paintings for the Temple with a series of small canvases called Primordial Chaos. By 1915 the cycle will hold 193 works.

In September 1907 you note a vision: ten “paradisaically beautiful” paintings are to be made. They are to show the four ages of life, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age, and, as you write, to give the world “an insight into the systematising of four divisions of human life”. Each is to take four days. The size is given too: about 3.3 by 2.4 metres.

Later you will describe these paintings as made “directly through me, without any preliminary drawing and with great force”. You say you did not know what they would show.

Ten

Two for Childhood, two for Youth, four for Adulthood, two for Old Age.

A colour for each age

Blue, orange, lilac, then pink and beige.

Huge

More than three metres tall: taller than a room in an ordinary flat.

You rent a studio of your own at Hamngatan 9, but these paintings are made in a large shared studio at Hamngatan 5, above Blanch's Café, where the painters Lotten Rönnqvist and Alma Arnell already work. You begin in October 1907.

A sheet more than three metres tall does not fit on an easel. Moderna Museet, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Art Gallery of New South Wales all think it likely that you painted the panels lying flat on the floor, at least in part. Kneeling or standing over the paper, you can reach the middle only by stepping onto it or leaning in from the edges; how you managed is not recorded.

Paper on the floor has another advantage: thin, quick-drying paint does not run.

You do not work alone. Two people from your circle help: Cornelia Cederberg, one of The Five, and Gusten Andersson. Following the spirits' instructions you ask Cederberg to help, the Art Gallery of New South Wales says, “though under af Klint's direction”. What either of them did, grinding colour, moving the paper, laying in the ground, is not recorded. Of Gusten Andersson almost nothing is known from the sources read for this guide.

The pace is extraordinary. The instructions allow four days a painting, and you finish all ten by December. Moderna Museet speaks of forty days for the ten, which matches four days each; other accounts say about two months, the time from the October start to the December finish.

Then you stop. The Five break up early in 1908, and in March you hear Rudolf Steiner lecture in Stockholm. In 1908 your mother goes blind, and you give up the studio.

For most guides in this series a museum has X-rayed the painting, sampled its layers and published what it found. For The Ten Largest, nothing of the kind has been published. The panels stayed in your studio and then with your family and the foundation; they became widely known only after Moderna Museet's exhibition in 2013 and the Guggenheim's in 2018.

• The paper. What kind, how many sheets per panel, and how they were joined.
• The paint. Which tempera: egg, egg and oil, or something else. No pigment has been identified.
• The mounting. When the paper was glued to canvas, by whom, and with what.
• The drawing. Whether the faint lines on No. 7 are graphite construction lines, and whether others lie under the paint.
• The floor. That the panels were painted lying flat is the museums' inference from their size. A claim that your footprints show on some of them was found only in an uncited student thesis.
• The helpers. What Cederberg and Andersson actually did, and who Andersson was.
• No. 7 itself. Your notes for this panel were not read for this guide. Fant (1989) and the catalogue raisonné may say more.