Ellen Thesleff

Biography

In 1892 Ellen Thesleff painted a portrait of her younger sister Thyra Elisabeth. She was twenty-two and studying in Paris, and the work was later regarded as one of the “purest” in Symbolist painting. That same year her father died.

She was born on 5 October 1869 in Helsingfors (Helsinki), in the Grand Duchy of Finland, into the family of Alexander August Thesleff, an amateur painter and her first teacher. Her mother was Emilia Mathilda Sanmark. Her childhood and youth were spent mostly in Kuopio and at the family summer house on the island of Kumpusaari; as a girl she sang and played the piano. Her brother Rolf became a diplomat, and her sister Gerda worked in ceramics.

Her training was sequential: in 1885–1886 with Adolf von Becker, in 1887–1890 at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society, and in 1890–1891 at the academy of Gunnar Berndtson. Before she went abroad, in 1891, she showed “Echo” at an exhibition in Helsinki; critics saw in it signs of a new tendency in Finnish art. The painting was later sold at auction, but the sum has no place in a biography.

In 1891–1892 and 1893–1894 Thesleff studied in Paris, at the Académie Colarossi, in the studio of Gustave Courtois, together with her friends Beda Stjernschantz and Anna Bremer. There she became enthusiastic about Puvis de Chavannes and for the first time saw original works by Leonardo, Botticelli and Michelangelo.

After her father’s death she stopped painting altogether for a time. When she returned to work, her pictures had become dark and extremely simple: scholars speak of a period of “black colourism”. One example is the “Self-Portrait”, signed with the years 1894 and 1895.

In 1894 she travelled to Italy for the first time: Florence, Rome and Naples, Masaccio and Fra Angelico. “One can learn a great deal from the old masters, because their art is honest,” she wrote. A year later she went back with her mother and sister, and in the winter of 1897 she lived in Florence among Finnish artists: Beda Stjernschantz, Hugo Simberg, Magnus Enckell and Akseli Gallen-Kallela were nearby, many of them with their families. Italy gradually became a second home. When the family estate at Murole was sold in 1898, a house called Casa Bianca was built to her drawings; sources differ on where exactly, on the bank of the Murole rapids in Finland or on the Italian coast. She spent the summers in Finland. In Florence she took up woodcut, and what prompted her was the English theatre reformer Edward Gordon Craig; sources give different dates for their meeting, 1897 or 1907. In 1900 she received a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

The change in her colour came around 1905–1906. She is said to have encountered the Phalanx group and the work of Wassily Kandinsky in Munich on her way to Italy; yellow, green, blue and violet appeared in her canvases, together with a freer treatment of subject. She is called the first Finnish Fauvist. She did not accept Symbolist fantasies of the kind Enckell painted, and when attempts were made to place her with the Septem group she answered sharply: she could not understand why one could not live by one’s own wits instead of repeating one another. She herself claimed that Manet had given her the most. Her late pictures are, to my mind, the strangest: layered colour fantasies in which the landscape almost dissolves.

In 1909–1912 she again lived for long periods in Finland, at Murole and in Helsinki. In 1922 she travelled to Kuopio, to her childhood memories, and brought back from there a series of pastels, now held in the city’s museum. In 1933 she was given a studio in the Lallukka artists’ home in Helsinki. In 1949 her work was praised at a large exhibition of Nordic art in Copenhagen, and in 1951 she was awarded the Pro Finlandia medal.

In the autumn of 1952 she was knocked down by a tram, broke her hip and never returned home. Ellen Thesleff died on 12 January 1954 in Helsinki. She never married.