Last year I found myself giving a lecture in Helsinki. When I came to the end, I asked the audience if there were any questions. There followed a period of complete silence, after which a man cleared his throat and explained that, being Finnish, it was extremely difficult for them to speak in public; they preferred to come to the podium afterwards, one by one.
The Finns are a quiet people, and Helene Schjerfbeck — who has claims to be the greatest Finnish painter — is a quiet artist. But her pictures, which are on show at the Royal Academy, have qualities that mild-mannered and taciturn individuals sometimes possess: seriousness and intensity. When she does raise her voice, it’s all the more telling.
A good example comes early in the exhibition. ‘The Door’ (1884) was painted when she was 23 and at work in the artist’s colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. It depicts a shadowy corner of a medieval building, perhaps the nearby chapel of Trémalo. One gothic arch can be seen, as well as a large area of blank wall and floor. The whole image is constructed of soft, subtly modulated blue-greys and dun browns — except for a tiny area surrounding a closed door, around which a thin strip of brilliant golden sunshine breaks through.
Although her idiom and subject matter changed drastically over the following 60-odd years, the little patch of bright colour singing out of a low-keyed picture continued to be a trademark. You find it in ‘Self Portrait with Red Spot’ (1944), a minute touch of scarlet that energises an otherwise entirely monochrome picture. So too did her preference for paint that, rather than being thick and shiny, was thin, matte and scraped down. She enthused about the ‘“dead” which yields such fabulous colour’.
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