Albert Edelfelt
Finland’s first international star.
Albert Edelfelt made his breakthrough in Paris with plein-air painting and portrayed Louis Pasteur. He was also active at home in Finland.
Albert Edelfelt was born in 1854 on the Kiala estate near Porvoo in Finland. His father was an architect who had emigrated from Sweden. Albert studied first in Helsinki and at the academy of fine arts in Antwerp. In 1874 he came to Paris, where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts.
He began with history painting but soon turned to realist plein-air painting. Conveying the Body of a Child of 1879, in which a family rows a small coffin across a Finnish lake, was a breakthrough and is now in the Ateneum in Helsinki. He became one of the first Nordic artists to achieve real success in Paris.
His great success came with the portrait of Louis Pasteur in his laboratory of 1885. It was bought by the French state and is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Among his best-loved works is also In the Luxembourg Gardens of 1887, with children and nursemaids in sunlight, which belongs to the Ateneum.
Edelfelt worked with precise drawing and light, natural colour. He moved easily between the Paris salons and subjects from the Finnish archipelago, and he spent his summers at Haikko near Porvoo. He also illustrated Runeberg’s The Tales of Ensign Stål. He was a generous colleague and supported younger artists, among them Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
Edelfelt died in 1905. He did much to make Finland visible as a nation of culture at a time when the country was a grand duchy under Russia. In Finland he is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 19th century.