Tove Jansson

Biography

In 1938 the cover of the magazine Garm showed Hitler as a screaming child in nappies. Around him Neville Chamberlain and other European leaders bustled about, pushing slices of cake at him: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. The editor later admitted that the magazine had almost been prosecuted for insulting the head of a friendly state. The cover was drawn by the twenty-four-year-old Tove Jansson.

She was born on 9 August 1914 in Helsinki, in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of the Russian Empire. According to other accounts, her birthplace was Helsingborg in Sweden. The family was Swedish-speaking and artistic: her father, Viktor Jansson, was a sculptor; her mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, had come from Sweden and worked as a graphic artist, designing Finnish postage stamps and illustrating magazines. Two brothers were born later, Per Olov, who became a photographer, and Lars, an artist and comic strip author. Tove often spent the summers with her Swedish relatives on the island of Blidö near Stockholm.

She published her first drawings at fourteen, and from the age of fifteen she contributed regularly to Garm, where her mother also worked. Her first picture book, “Sara and Pelle and Neptune’s Children”, she wrote and drew at fourteen, but it came out only in 1933, under the pseudonym Vera Haij.

Jansson studied in Stockholm from 1930 to 1933, at a school of applied arts, living with her uncle, Professor Einar Hammarsten. In 1933 she returned to Helsinki and enrolled in the painting class at the drawing school of the Finnish Art Society, known as the Ateneum. By her own account the teachers had little influence on her; more important were her friendship and love with the painter Sam Vanni, which strengthened her view of the role of colour. In spring 1936 most of the students in the painting class walked out of the Ateneum in protest, and Jansson and three companions rented a shared studio in Ullanlinna. She later returned and finished her studies in 1937. In 1938 she studied in Paris and Brittany on a grant, and in 1939 she travelled to Italy. Her first solo exhibition opened in Helsinki in 1943.

Painting alone could not support her. She illustrated children’s books, drew postcards and advertisements, and wrote short stories for Swedish-language magazines. She worked for Garm for about twenty years, drawing around a hundred covers and a great many other pictures. She enjoyed being, in her own words, “piggish” towards Hitler and Stalin; in March 1940, just before the Moscow Peace Treaty, the censors banned a cover that mocked Stalin’s military incompetence.

The character from whom the Moomintroll developed first appeared in her caricatures as a signature next to her name. At first he was thin and spiteful, with a long nose, and was called Snork. She herself said that she had drawn “the ugliest creature imaginable” on the wall of an outhouse after an argument with her brother about Kant, and had written beneath it: “Kant”. The word “Moomin” was coined by her uncle Einar, who frightened his niece, a pilferer of food, with a Moomintroll that lived in the kitchen cupboard and breathed cold air down people’s necks. Her first book, “The Moomins and the Great Flood”, was written during the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland and published in 1945; it was hardly noticed. “Comet in Moominland” (1946) sold badly, and the publisher declined further sequels. The third book, “Finn Family Moomintroll” (1948), brought out by another publisher, was a success in Finland and Sweden, and then abroad.

Meanwhile she was working on walls. In 1945 she decorated the canteen of the Strömberg factory in Pitäjänmäki, in 1947 she made two frescoes for the restaurant in the cellar of Helsinki City Hall, and in 1954 she painted the altarpiece “The Ten Virgins” for the church in Teuva, her only church work. There were murals in the Aurora Children’s Hospital, in a hotel in Hamina and in schools; her last public oil murals were made in 1984 for a kindergarten in Pori. She learned fresco technique from the fresco expert Niilo Suihko.

In the 1950s she drew comic strips about the Moomins for the London Evening News, where they began to appear in 1954. Her brother Lars later took them over. Jansson also illustrated other people’s books: Swedish editions of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “The Hunting of the Snark”, and in 1962 the Swedish edition of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”. The Moomin series ended with “Moominvalley in November” (1970). After that came prose for adults: the autobiographical “The Sculptor’s Daughter” (1968), “The Summer Book” (1972), “Sun City” and “The Field of Stones”.

From 1956 her companion was the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. For many years they spent their summers on the tiny island of Klovharu in the Gulf of Finland. Tove Jansson received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal (1966), the Finnish state’s Pro Finlandia medal in gold (1976), the Selma Lagerlöf Prize and the title of honorary professor of Finland (1995).

She died on 27 June 2001 in Helsinki and is buried in Hietaniemi Cemetery.