Helene Schjerfbeck

(Finland, 10/07/1862 - 23/01/1946)

Self-Portrait, Black Background (1915)

One of Finland’s most well-known artists, Schjerfbeck’s talent was evident early in her life. After falling down some stairs and breaking her hip at three years old, she was left with a limp for the remainder of her life. It was while recovering from the incident that her father (her most ardent supporter) gave her a set of pencils, allowing her to draw during the long recovery and inspiring her interest in art. She later said, ‘When you give a child a pencil, you give her an entire world’.

Indeed, through her pencil, the world she was given. By the age of eleven she enrolled in art classes where her talent was considered so remarkable that her work was shown to the renowned Finnish artist Adolf von Becker. Impressed by her talent, von Becker arranged a free scholarship for Schjerfbeck to attend the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society where she was the youngest student ever accepted by the institution.

By the age of seventeen she began winning prizes and a year later her work was exhibited for the first time in the Society exhibition, after which she received a grant from the Imperial Russian Senate. This grant allowed her to move to Paris where she enrolled in the Académie Trélat followed by the Académie Colarossi.

After returning to Finland in 1894, she was appointed chief instructor at the Society’s drawing school and insisted on complete silence in her classes.

While early in her career she was inspired by the likes of Jules Bastein-Lepage, Schjerfbeck gradually left behind his meticulous approach to art, preferring instead to distil the essence of her subjects with tone and colour. Details became increasingly superfluous and the works produced in the last years of her life are executed with a few simple lines.

In 1905 Schjerfbeck’s work was included in an exhibition of women artists at the Ateneum in Helsinki. It was the last time she agreed to be in such an exhibition. “After all” she later wrote to her friend and fellow artist Einar Reuter, “there are no exhibitions for ‘men only’. Should not everything hinge on the art work itself?”

Image: Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, Black Background (1915). Oil on canvas. 45.5 x 36 cm. Herman and Elisabeth Hallonblad Collection. Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland.