Henrika Šantel was a contemporary of the Slovenian impressionist painters, born in the same year as their youngest representative Matej Sternen. As a woman, she started her schooling at the age of 17 at the Damenakademie in Munich, going on to further her studies under the painters Anna Hillermann and Josef Michalek in Vienna. She returned to both Vienna and Munich periodically from 1904 to 1907. While in Munich, she met Roza Klein and Matej Sternen, but it seems she kept her distance from Ažbe and his school. Her work displays an affinity for the realism and naturalism of the 1890s, produced with skills that, until now, critics have only ever lauded in the company of other female artists. Her Rdečelasa Deklica (The Redheaded Girl) is likely the Rdečelaska found in a catalog from a Triestine exhibition in 1907. We must agree with renowned art historian Tomaž Brejc’s assertion that this work could only have been produced in one of the continent’s artistic hubs, most likely Munich. This is suggested by the white dress and red hair as an echo of James McNeill Whistler’s popularity. The ethical quandary between, on the one hand, the eroticized arrangement of the model’s pose in the studio, with her bare shoulders and red, mostly disheveled hair falling on her shoulder, and on the other hand her pubescent age and empty gaze comprise the realistic subject matter of the female paintbrush. As Brejc put it, only a female artist could have captured the “delicate image of her psyche”, seeing the model as a child thrust into the world of adults. Her melancholy, her fragility, and the softness of her features are juxtaposed by a space defined by the predominant vertical lines of the wallpaper pattern, the legs of two chairs, and the picture frame on the wall, with only the suggestion of the horizontal to lean on.