The high summer of Finnish art

Never say that Finns don’t have religion. They have kesä – summer – that sweet, intense, poignantly short season from mid-June to mid-August when, seemingly, all five million Finns close up shop and head upcountry or to one of the myriad islands or archipelagos adjoining the country’s endless coastline. They drink in the long blue days at their mökki.

The eco-pantheistic Finns also have a word to describe the ecstatic midpoint of their favourite season, when the orb is at its brightest and the ‘white nights’ their most opalescent, keskikesä – the heart of summer. High summer to us.

Finnish art, like that of other nations, also had its high summer, or summers, discrete years when the country’s collective afflatus was at its apogee, and when a bevy of its most prolific artists wrought their greatest works.

The keskikesä of Finnish art? My first vote is for 1893. It was in that year, at the start of what Finns call Suomen taiteen kultakausi – the Golden Age of Finnish Art – that three of Finland’s greatest painters, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Eero Järnefelt and Gunnar Berndtson, all of whom also happened to be close friends, painted The Forging of the Sampo, Under the Yoke and Summer, respectively.

It is no coincidence that that magical era coincided with a period of increasing political repression as St Petersburg sought to bind the restive, autonomous grand duchy closer to Mother Russia, which in turn inspired Finnish artists of various genres to resist.

It was in 1893 that the Vyborg Students’ Association commissioned Jean Sibelius, who would go on to become Finland’s greatest symphonist, to write the music for his Karelia Suite, depicting scenes from the history of Finland’s then easternmost province, parts of which were still ruled directly by Russia.

The year 1893 also saw the creation of several other Finnish cultural landmarks. The Finnish National Museum, the country’s first proper museum, was established that year. Finland would not finally wrest itself of imperial Russia’s yoke and declare its political independence until 1917. One could argue, however, that 1893 was the year when the nation attained its cultural statehood.

That year was a high point for Gallen-Kallela. At 28 he was already a prominent member of the capital’s close-knit artistic scene and the flag-bearer for the romantic nationalism that emerged during the Russian clampdown. Born in 1865, during the reign of Tsar Alexander II, the so-called ‘Tsar Liberator’, the Swedish-speaking Finn was a native of Pori, the picturesque port city. It was there that the young Axel Gallen, as he was originally known before he Finnicised his name, developed both his deep love for terra magica, as Finns call their verdant, lake-strewn land, and his yearning to paint.

Gallen-Kallela’s mother, an enthusiastic amateur painter, encouraged her son’s artistic ambitions. His father, a police chief, did not, and in 1876 dispatched him to Helsinki and the Swedish Normal School to quash them. However, once he got to the big city there was no stopping him. In 1878, still only 13, the art-mad teen enrolled in the noted drawing programme of the august Finnish Art Society. By 1881 the Swedish-speaking Finnophile was a full-time student. He also took private lessons from Albert Edelfelt, a great realist painter and a towering talent of his day.

Like Edelfelt and many Finnish artists, Gallen-Kallela followed his muse to Paris where he continued his education at the Académie Julian and fell under the spell of French Realism and the quasi-impressionistic naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage, inspiring him to create a series of winsome portraits of the French capital and la vie bohème.

Returning home, he executed a series of naturalistic paintings of the people of the Finnish countryside and terra magica, including the haunting Boy with a Crow depicting an ill-clad peasant boy and a crow. They proved rather too naturalistic for the rising star’s conservative critics.

A national consciousness-raising trip to Karelia in 1890 coupled with a desire to give visual form to Finland’s oral folklore led the painter to take his oeuvre in a radical direction, back in time to the pre-Christian setting of Kalevala, the fabled early 19th-century poem about the creation of the world, and a pillar of Finnish identity.

The following year the artist executed The Aino Myth, a triptych based on the tragic story of a young maiden promised in marriage to an old sage. She drowns herself to escape, but then undergoes a magical transformation. The huge painting was the first of a series of five monumental Kalevala-inspired paintings combining dramatic storytelling with the symbolism he would elaborate over the next decade. The stunning murals, viewed in person or in reproduction by a large proportion of the grand duchy’s then two and a half million population, came to form the country’s imaginative firmament. In a sense, they still do.

Two summers later, Gallen-Kallela and his wife journeyed to Lake Kallavesi in the eastern central region of Finland, known as the lake country. It was there that he painted The Forging of the Sampo, the next instalment of the astonishing series. Perhaps the most unusual of the group, in that it combined a mythic scene with gritty reality, the painting shows the divine smith, Ilmarinen, in what could pass for a rugged upcountry logging camp.

Although the new-found artistic rebel took his work and his nationalistic mission seriously, he also had a sense of humour about himself and his circle of friends. In 1893, Gallen-Kallela drew a caricature of his latest masterpiece depicting himself in the role of Ilmarinen, while several suspiciously modern-looking helpers, recast to resemble other prominent members of the Helsinki art scene, including Järnefelt and Berndtson, bemusedly look on.

As it happens, both aforementioned artists were also busy that summer. While Gallen-Kallela was applying the final touches on his romantic interpretation of Suomi’s ancient origins by the shore of Lake Kallavesi, Järnefelt was sat before his easel at an ordinary farmhouse in Lapinlahti 60 miles to the north, labouring over his decidedly unromantic masterpiece, Under the Yoke.

One of the most haunting paintings to emerge from the Industrial Revolution, no less from bucolic Finland, Järnefelt’s landmark work illustrates in harrowing detail the back-breaking slash-and-burn farming method poor families in the outer provinces employed to grow their meagre crop and avoid starvation.

In many respects Järnefelt’s life and career path paralleled that of Gallen-Kallela’s. Two years older than his friend and colleague, Järnefelt, also Finnicised his name (from Erik to Eero); also studied in Paris and fell under the spell of Bastien-Lepage’s school of plein air painting; and ‘graduated’ to painting landscapes exalting terra magica, too.

However, in the summer of 1893 the two friends’ aesthetic paths diverged. While Gallen-Kallela was putting the final touches on the beard of his imaginary ancient smith, Järnefelt was busy blackening the face of Johanna Kokkonen, the very real 14-year-old farmhand at the centre of his masterwork, with soot, and giving her a look of reproach. The memory of past famines, like the devastating one of 1866-68, in which an estimated quarter of a million Finns perished, as well as the fear of future ones, is burned into her eyes.

Predictably, Under the Yoke scandalised Järnefelt’s well-to-do collectors when he exhibited it four years later, causing him to change its name to the less provocative Burning the Brushwood. One suspects that tsarist officials weren’t thrilled either. Järnefelt never painted anything like it again. Yet the spellbinding painting, which hangs in Helsinki’s Ateneum around the corner from Forging the Sampo, is incontestably his greatest work.

While Gallen-Kallela and Järnefelt were daubing away in their respective artistic bubbles in the lake country in the summer of 1893, several hundred miles to the south, in the coastal town of Pernaja, Gunnar Berndtson was busy creating his elegy to Finns’ favourite season with the aid of his serenely beautiful 15-year-old niece, Karin.

Berndtson is perhaps the least well-remembered of the trio, which is a shame, because in a way, albeit in a narrow one, in the sheer precision of his images, he was arguably the most gifted of the group. Partly this is because of the relatively small size of his output. The senior of the three, he died of a sudden illness two years after executing Summer, at the age of 40; partly, one suspects, his relative obscurity is because, artistically, he had little in common with his more overtly ‘patriotic’ friends.

Berndtson’s background, to be sure, mirrored theirs. Like Gallen-Kallela and Järnefelt, he also was a Swedish-speaking Finnophile; like them he also studied in Paris, where he steeped himself in French Salon painting. However, unlike his exuberantly, proudly Finnish friends, he never really left Paris and the world of the belle époque.

Instead he brought Paris to Finland. At first glance there is little recognisably Finnish about his winsome portrait of his niece, whom the artist depicts sitting on a rustic wooden dock, momentarily distracted by something or someone out of the frame as she reads a book – a friend perhaps. Or just an errant thought.

The exquisite details – the elegant hat, the perfectly rendered translucent water revealing the stones beneath, the lifelike folds of Karin’s dress. All of these are the hallmarks of a French master.

Then again, when one looks closely, for anyone who knows Finland and what summer truly means to Finns, especially a good summer, as they say, like the effulgent one brilliantly evoked here: the opalescent blue sky, the sunshine shimmering in the water, the feeling that time has stopped, and yes the book, too. Then, then, you see how Finnish Berndtson’s masterpiece is.

I saw it the moment I first encountered Summer 25 years ago on a visit to the Turku Art Museum. That, I said to myself, is Finland. I know that girl with the carefree look. I know that moment. Of course I bought a post card of Summer at the museum shop. I still have it. Every spring I pull it out and prop it up to remind me of summer’s approach, and the endless summer of 1893 when Finnish art reached its apotheosis.

It stays up until August. Then I put it back.