Helene Schjerfbeck
Finland’s master of the self-portrait.
Helene Schjerfbeck painted self-portraits for over sixty years, increasingly simplified and pared down. Today she is regarded as one of the great Nordic modernists.
Helene Schjerfbeck was born in 1862 in Helsinki. At the age of four she fell down a flight of stairs and injured her hip, which left her with a lifelong limp. She was therefore taught at home. Her talent was discovered early, and at just eleven she was admitted to the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society.
In 1880 she travelled to Paris on a scholarship and studied at the Académie Colarossi. She painted in Brittany, at Pont-Aven and Concarneau, and later in the English artists’ colony of St Ives. There she painted The Convalescent of 1888, a little girl in bed with a twig in a glass. The painting won a medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 and is now in the Ateneum in Helsinki.
After returning home she taught at the Art Society’s school, but her health was poor. In 1902 she moved with her mother to the small town of Hyvinkää, where she lived for fifteen years. There, far from the art world, she developed her own modern style. The Seamstress of 1905, also in the Ateneum, shows how she simplified forms and toned down colours. She followed international art through magazines and was influenced by, among others, Whistler, Cézanne and fashion.
Her breakthrough came with a solo exhibition in Helsinki in 1917. The art dealer Gösta Stenman became her supporter and sold her works in both Finland and Sweden. She often worked by scraping and sanding the paint, so that the surface became matt and worn. She also painted new versions of older pictures, both her own and those of old masters.
Throughout her life she painted self-portraits, some forty in all, from her youth to her last years. The late portraits, made in Saltsjöbaden, where she had fled during the war, are almost skull-like in their pared-down honesty. She died there in 1946. Today she is regarded as one of the foremost Nordic modernists.