Helene Schjerfbeck

Biography

In the autumn of 1866 the four-year-old Helene fell down a flight of stairs and injured her hip. Because of this she did not go to school, and the limp stayed with her for life.

She was born on 10 July 1862 in Helsinki (then Helsingfors), in the Grand Duchy of Finland, into a Swedish-speaking family. Her father, Svante Schjerfbeck, was an office manager at the railway's mechanical workshop; her mother, Olga Johanna Printz, kept house. Her older brother Magnus became an architect. Her father died on 2 February 1876, and her mother began taking in lodgers to make ends meet.

At eleven, in 1873, Helene entered the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society; her fees were paid by Adolf von Becker, who saw promise in her. There she became friends with Helena Westermarck, and later with Maria Wiik. She finished at the school a little over a year after her father's death and went on to Becker’s own private studio, where he taught her French oil-painting techniques. In 1879 she won third prize in a competition held by the Society, and in 1880 her work was shown at its annual exhibition. That summer she stayed at Sjundby Manor, the estate of her maternal aunt, and drew her cousins; the manor later appeared in several of her landscapes. Her first major pictures were historical: “Wounded Warrior in the Snow” (1880), “At the Door of Linköping Jail in 1600” (1882) and “The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin” (1886). The genre was regarded as a male preserve, and these paintings were received coolly.

In late 1880 she left for Paris on a grant from the Imperial Russian Senate. She studied with Léon Bonnat and Gustave Courtois (she later regarded Courtois as her most important teacher), and from 1881 at the Académie Colarossi. A second grant allowed her to spend time in Meudon and in Pont-Aven in Brittany. She returned to France in 1884, took part in the Salon and painted “The Door” (1884) in a chapel near Pont-Aven. In the autumn of 1883 she had become engaged to the Swedish painter Otto Hagborg. The engagement ended in 1885, when the groom’s family suspected tuberculosis, although the cause of her limp was the childhood fall. She never married. In 1886 she was in Paris again, and in 1887 she went to St Ives in Cornwall, where she painted “The Bakery” and “The Convalescent”. The second won a bronze medal at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and is regarded as one of the best-known paintings in Finland.

In the 1890s she taught at the Society’s drawing school, but by 1901 illness made it impossible to continue, and in 1902 she resigned. On her doctor’s advice she and her mother moved to Hyvinkää, whose dry climate was thought to be healthy, and they stayed there for more than two decades. In those years she barely left for Helsinki and learned of new art from magazines and books sent by friends. She painted still lifes, landscapes, portraits of her mother, of local schoolgirls and of women workers, and self-portraits. Comparisons with Whistler and Munch come readily, but from 1905, to my mind, her painting speaks in a voice of its own: less detail, restrained colour, a figure set against an almost flat ground.

In 1913 the art dealer Gösta Stenman sought her out and set about making her known. Her work was shown in Malmö (1914), Stockholm (1916) and Petrograd (1917). In 1917 Stenman organised her first solo exhibition in Helsinki. That same year Einar Reuter, a forest officer and art enthusiast who had befriended her in Hyvinkää, published the first monograph on her under the pseudonym Ahtela. Later came exhibitions in Copenhagen (1919), Gothenburg (1923) and Stockholm (1934, 1937). From 1938 Stenman paid her a monthly stipend. A large exhibition planned for the United States in 1939 did not take place because of the war. For her eightieth birthday, in 1942, Stenman organised a tribute exhibition in Stockholm.

After her mother’s death in 1923, in 1925 she settled in Tammisaari (Ekenäs), where she mostly painted still lifes and reworked old pictures. She learned lithography when she was already in her seventies. When the Winter War began in December 1939, she moved for a year to a farm in Tenala, then returned to Ekenäs, then lived in a nursing home and from 1942 in the Luontola sanatorium in Nummela. In February 1944, with Stenman’s help, she travelled to Sweden and settled in the spa hotel at Saltsjöbaden. There she kept working and painted a series of late self-portraits.

She died on 23 January 1946 and is buried in Hietaniemi Cemetery in Helsinki.