Helena Westermarck

Biography

The painting “The Ironers” (in Swedish, Strykerskor) won second prize from the Finnish Art Society in 1883 and first prize a year later, and in 1889 it received an honourable mention at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. It is Helena Westermarck's best-known painting, executed in a naturalistic manner.

She was born on 20 November 1857 in Helsingfors (Helsinki), then in the Grand Duchy of Finland, into an educated city family. Her father worked at the university, and her mother was a professor's daughter. Her brother Edvard Westermarck became a well-known anthropologist and sociologist. From 1874 to 1877 Helena studied at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society in Helsingfors, then painted under Adolf von Becker, in whose private school she studied until about 1880. There she made friends with Helene Schjerfbeck, and the friendship lasted all their lives. Together with Maria Wiik and Elin Danielson-Gambogi they belonged to a circle of young women painters known as “the painter sisters”. She first showed work at the Art Society's annual exhibition in the late 1870s. In 1880 Westermarck went to Paris and studied at the Académie Colarossi in 1880–1881 and in 1884. In France she worked for long periods, often together with Schjerfbeck, and her portraits and figure compositions are in a sober, realistic vein. In Paris she fell ill with a lung disease and, after recovering, never returned to painting. Even while undergoing treatment she began to write essays and reviews, including some on art, for the journal “Finsk Tidskrift”.

I think the enforced break is what made literature the main work of her life.

In 1890–1891 she published “Ur studieboken”, a two-volume collection of stories and essays. It was followed by a study of George Eliot and the English naturalistic novel (1894), the novella “Framåt” (1894), folk tales from Nyland retold for young readers (1897) and the novella “Lifvets seger” (1898). The novel “I fru Ulrikas hem” (“In Mrs Ulrika's Home”, 1900), the first part of the cycle “Tecken och minnesskrift från adertonhundratalet”, brought her recognition, and in the same year she received the State Literature Prize. It was continued by “Ljud i natten” (1903) and “Vandrare” (1910 or 1911; sources differ).

When the Feminist Union (Naisasialiitto Unioni) was founded in 1892, she became one of its first members. In 1895 in Helsingfors she founded the monthly Swedish-language magazine “Nutid”, devoted to women's rights, and edited it.

Her later books are mostly biographical. She wrote about Fredrika Runeberg (1904, 1912), compiled the collection “Kvinnospår” (“Women's Traces”, 1913), studied the life of Elisabeth Blomqvist (1916–1917), and then of Mathilda Rotkirch, the first Finnish woman painter (1926), Adelaïde Ehrnrooth (1928) and Rosina Heikel, the first Finnish woman doctor (1930). For these studies she worked in the British Library alongside her brother. Her last book published in her lifetime, “Tre konstnärinnor” (1937), is about Fanny Churberg, Maria Wiik and Sigrid af Forselles.

Helena Westermarck died in Helsinki on 5 or 6 April 1938. Her memoirs, “Mina levnadsminnen”, appeared in 1941, after her death.