Artist of the Week: Helene Schjerfbeck

This weeks artist is a Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1945). From the photographs and portraits that she painted of herself looks out a fragile, but serious and decisive woman. Her art also reflects that - in them her personal tenderness and strength are combined. Often the artist is focused on describing the most central character in the painting, leaving the background almost empty.

Helene Schjerfbeck's life was shadowed by an accident at the age of four, effecting her ability to walk. When growing up she often had to watch while others played their lively games. Later in life she was no stranger to loneliness, withdrawal or even becoming a hermit. In her art you can also see the same things, and her independent and personal style has often been described as being detached from the Finnish art of the time.


Schjerfbeck had excellent drawing skills and she was taken into drawing school when she was only 11 years old. As a young artist she proved to be capable of producing works that were demanding in size, subject matter and that she could also do paintings about historic events - just as the male artists of her time. When she started to portray children and women, the critics said she painted things that were not significant. Schjerfbeck, however, did not go back to the "masculine" subjects - and later on, her numerous child portraits have become the jewels of her production. For example, today one of her most beloved works is a painting portraying a child healing from an illness.

From that particular painting you can find a lot of the painter herself. Like the child, Helene healed from her own illnes and later on from the pain inflicted by a broken engagement and the criticism towards her art. As early as 1902 she left the artist life in the capital city and moved to live with her mother in Hyvinkää. She lived the rest of her life without contacts to the outside world - this also meant giving up her connections to other artists, only few female artists remained as a part of her life.

Schjerfbeck chose loneliness and she interacted almost only with her own art. After she withdrew herself, her paintings took a more fragile and thoughtful tone. The artist was rarely satisfied with her own work: she painted them again and again, even after many years she came back to paint the same subject again, she played with them and even destroyed some of them. When she was painting, she also brushed and wiped off the extra colour from them, which gave them the unique, easily recognizable fragile glimmer.

Through her life she painted selfportraits, in which she portrayed amazingly bravely her aging process and revealed herself and her mind for others to see. While the years passed on, her rosy cheeks changed more and more simpler in shape.

Finally, just before she died, she painted herself only with a few careful strokes but so that you could still recognize her face. Through her long life, Schjerfbeck had succeeded in taking her skill of simplyfying and focusing into her grand finale.