Magnus Enckell

Biography

Magnus Enckell died in Stockholm, where he had gone for his own exhibition; he was fifty-five. He was buried in his home town of Hamina, and the funeral, according to surviving accounts, became a national event.

He was born on 9 November 1870 in Hamina (Fredrikshamn in Swedish), then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland. His father, Carl Enckell, was a priest, and Magnus was the youngest of six sons. His native language was Swedish, spoken by part of the Finnish population. One of his elder brothers, Axel, also left a mark on the history of the country.

In 1889 he began studying at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society in Helsinki, but soon left and worked privately with Gunnar Berndtson. Naturalism was the established style at the time, and Enckell’s first works are painted in that manner. In 1891 he went to Paris for the first time and entered the Académie Julian, where his teachers were Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. There Symbolism took hold of him: he was drawn to the painting of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, to Symbolist literature, to the mystical ideas of Joséphin Péladan and to the Renaissance. In Brittany he made two works in spare colours, “Self-Portrait” and “Breton Woman”. On his second visit, in 1893, he painted “The Awakening”: a rigorous composition and transparent colours create a spiritual atmosphere, and contact with the Swedish artists Olof Sager-Nelson and Ivan Aguéli deepened his interest in mysticism. His first exhibition took place the same year.

In 1894–1895 Enckell travelled in Italy (Milan, Florence, Ravenna, Siena, Venice), and then went on to Switzerland and Germany, where he saw the work of Arnold Böcklin. By then Parisian mysticism had disappointed him. In 1898, in Florence, he taught himself fresco and tempera by studying Masaccio and Fra Angelico. At the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 he won a silver medal.

Around 1902 his colours grew lighter. “The Golden Age” (1904), later placed in the library of the University of Helsinki, shows the shift from brown and grey to a brighter, decorative range. With Verner Thomé and Ellen Thesleff he founded the group Septem, which brought together colourist painters who shared his views. Under the influence of Post-Impressionism he made the series “The Bathers”. To my mind, after 1909 we are looking at almost a different painter: the pure palette, close to Pointillism, is linked to the influence of Septem and of Alfred Finch.

In 1906–1907 Enckell carried out the commission for the altarpiece area of Tampere Cathedral. The fresco, more than ten metres wide and four high, shows the resurrection of people of all races, painted in subdued colours; in the middle two men walk hand in hand. The parishioners appreciated it at once.

From 1901 he often spent summers on the island of Suursaari, where in 1910 he painted “Boys on the Beach”. He organised exhibitions of Finnish art in Berlin (1903) and Paris (1908; that year he was commissioner of the Finnish section at the Salon d’Automne and was elected one of its members), and of French and Belgian art in Helsinki (1904). From 1915 to 1918 he chaired the Artists’ Association of Finland, and in 1922 he was elected a member of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. He was a Knight of the French Legion of Honour. In 1920 he bought Villa Eka in Espoo.