Elin Danielson-Gambogi

Biography

In December 2004, at the Misericordia cemetery in Livorno, a grave was consecrated anew that had been removed twenty years earlier under a law on the reuse of burial plots. The remains of the painter and her husband were found and placed in separate zinc boxes, and a new monument was set up with the same poetic dedication that had been on the old stone.

Elin Kleopatra Danielson was born on 3 September 1861 in Noormarkku, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, into a Swedish-speaking family in which both her father and her mother came from families of officers and officials. Her childhood was spent on the farm of Ala-Sihtola in Ilmajoki. Because of the poor harvests of the 1860s the farm failed, and soon afterwards her father took his own life. Her mother returned to Noormarkku with her two daughters and managed to pay for their private schooling.

At fifteen Elin moved to Helsinki, lodged with relatives on her mother’s side, and entered the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Society, where she studied alongside Helene Schjerfbeck and Helena Westermarck. She was moved at once into the class that drew from plaster casts of antique sculpture. She then studied at the private academy of Adolf von Becker, where she learned oil painting and became acquainted with French realism. Still lifes and portraits survive from these years. She hesitated for a long time: she considered applied art, studied porcelain painting, made decorative designs for the Arabia factory, and taught drawing, including at the teachers’ seminary in Jyväskylä. What helped her choose painting was the encouragement of two teachers, Carl Eneas Sjöstrand and von Becker.

In 1883 she went to Paris and studied at the Académie Colarossi, in the women’s studio, where they drew and painted every day from eight to five. Gustave Courtois is named among her teachers. In the summers she worked outdoors in Brittany. Already in the first summer, 1884, her palette grew noticeably lighter, but she did not adopt the grey tones of Jules Bastien-Lepage. Her Breton works show ships, oyster gatherers and apple picking; among the best of them is counted “Breton Girl” (1885).

Back in Finland she lived chiefly with relatives in Noormarkku. The sources differ on the date: by some accounts she opened a studio there in 1881, by others in 1888. She taught drawing at various schools in the country, including in Helsinki and Turku. From 1886 to 1892 she visited the artists’ colony at Önningeby on the Åland Islands, founded by Victor Westerholm. In the early 1890s came works in a national-romantic vein: “Mother’s Worry” (1891), “Girl in the Forest” (1893) and “Potato Pickers” (1893). She also painted altarpieces for churches: at Ahlainen (1888), Kemiö (1897) and the old church of Noormarkku (1899). The last of these was destroyed in 1918, during the civil war.

In 1895, on a scholarship, Danielson went to Florence, and the next year she settled in Antignano, on the coast near Livorno, where she began to paint the sea. The southern light did not come easily to her at first. There she met the painter Raffaello Gambogi, thirteen years her junior, and on 27 February 1898 she married him.

The couple showed their work together: in Paris, Florence, Milan and Finnish towns. At the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris she won a bronze medal; she took part in the Venice Biennale in 1899, and in 1899 King Umberto bought one of her paintings. In 1901 she took second place in a state portrait competition in Finland. From these years come “After Dinner” (1900), painted by lamplight, and “Fine Weather” (1901), in which a woman hangs washing out in the Mediterranean sun. Several interiors caused controversy in Helsinki: in “The Cleaner” a corset was visible, and in “Morning Dress” an unmade double bed. “Aunt Balda’s Pastime” (1886), which shows smoking and card playing, was likewise thought improper.

In the 1900s life was hard, and paintings sold poorly in Italy. Her mother died in 1908, and Elin could get to Finland only in 1911, to arrange a large exhibition of her own work and her husband’s. She returned to Italy in October 1913. The First World War cut her ties with her homeland, and by the end of her life she had been almost forgotten in Finland. Elin Danielson-Gambogi died at Antignano on 31 December 1919 and was buried in Livorno.

Exhibitions resumed later: in 1995 at the museum in Hämeenlinna, in 2002 in Livorno, and in 2007 at the Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki. In 2011 a monument marking the 150th anniversary of her birth was unveiled in Noormarkku.