"Artists are migratory birds without a permanent city", writes the artist Jeanna Bauck in a letter from 1883 to her friend Hildegard Thorell. Bauck and Thorell are two less well-known names among the many Nordic women artists who traveled to the continent to train as professional artists at the end of the 19th century. They exhibited extensively abroad, studied at private women's academies, established friendships and maintained their own studios. Within a few years, they evolved from bourgeois girls living in their parents' homes to independent professional women. This free and independent life eventually takes on completely new expressions in painting: suddenly the women depict themselves in simple work clothes or a painter's coat, sitting on the floor in the studio or in a nightgown and slippers in the company of the model in relaxed privacy. The thesis examines these multifaceted self-images in relation to the professionalization and cosmopolitan lifestyle that characterized the artists in question. Selected self-portraits, pictures of peers and studio interiors by Eva Bonnier, Mina Carlson-Bredberg, Hanna Hirsch-Pauli, Asta Nørregaard and Bertha Wegmann, among others, are analyzed in detail in a comparative study, where the central role of community and collaboration, as well as the importance of the studio for the artists' identity creation, is highlighted. Alongside known and unknown works of art, the study also presents extensive, hitherto unpublished archive material from across the Nordic region.