How a sceptre became a distaff

What if the distaff had first been a sceptre? Before Queen Bertha and the Spinners, painted by Albert Anker in 1888, this question immediately changes our view. The queen teaches a craft gesture to young girls, but her association with spinning does not rest on a documented account of a medieval lesson. The Swiss National Museum explains how a figure of memory took shape, notably through the reinterpretation of a seal. The painting comes at the end of this long transformation, with a scene familiar enough to make us forget its strange origin.

The historian Kurt Messmer describes a testament attributed to Bertha, fabricated in the early twelfth century, long after her lifetime. On the seal of a version held in Lausanne, she carries a sceptre decorated with fleurs-de-lis. In the seventeenth century, an interpretation proposes identifying it as a distaff. From this develops the image of a pious, industrious sovereign. This is not Anker falsifying a source. The painter receives an already well-established tradition and transforms it in turn into an image capable of meeting the public of his time.

Looking at the work — In the MCBA reproduction, the queen sits dressed in blue amid a group of four young girls. One stands directly before her with a distaff; the others occupy the left and right. Their hands are particularly legible against the pale wall. A basket of fibres appears below, with pink flowers near the upper right. The group takes up almost the entire width of the painting. Yet the figures do not all display the same closeness to the teacher.

Anker paints an apprenticeship rather than a royal exploit. The MCBA stresses the distinction between this genre scene and an assured historical episode in Bertha's life. The girls are not aligned in the same gesture. Some handle thread, one receives more direct assistance, another remains further back. We can follow these distances in the image without assigning words or thoughts to them. The visible variety gives transmission a concrete form: learning something does not automatically place every pupil in the same position or at the same moment.

Hand spinning also takes on a particular significance in this late nineteenth-century period, marked by spinning mills and the displacement of craft labour. The museum reads the painting as a celebration of transmission, linked notably to Pestalozzi's educational ideas. The painting can therefore look towards the past while addressing a question to Anker's present. A legendary queen lends her prestige to ordinary knowledge. The subject's grandeur does not rest on signs of conquest; it concentrates on a gesture the adult guides and young hands try to master.

The painting finds support beyond the studio. It is acquired for the museum in 1890 through a public subscription. This choice reveals support for an image that people wish to make available in a shared collection. The subscription does not prove that every donor shared exactly the same interpretation. It establishes a simpler fact: the painting prompted a collective desire to preserve it. Around a scene of transmission, another group forms, this time comprising those who contribute to its entry into a museum.

The image subsequently continues to nourish popular memory. The National Museum holds an 1899 postcard reproducing the group inspired by Anker and associating it with Payerne's abbey church and a seal. The painting and the old document are brought together in a new representation. This juxtaposition can create a sense of historical obviousness around something that actually belongs to several periods. The small printed object thus shows the painting's strength: a scene created in the nineteenth century now helps depict a medieval queen for viewers who will not necessarily return to the sources.

Knowing this history does not prevent us from being moved by the gestures before the work. It allows us to hold together their beauty and the path of memory that gave them a queen. Anker did not recover a spinning lesson lost in the past; he gave a tradition a living form. The final turn lies in the central object. A distaff now connects the sovereign to the children, while a sceptre once contributed to creating this image. The painting speaks of transmission, and its history reminds us that images also transmit their own transformations.