But it’s at Helsinki’s Ateneum, part of Finland’s national art museum, that most of her paintings can been seen. Successful in her own lifetime, she was the only woman artist who sat on the board of the Finnish Art Society. However, she didn’t have her first solo exhibition until 1917, when she was in her 50s, and she wasn’t a household name in Finland until the 1980s, when feminist art historians sought to rescue under-recognised female artists.
“What we know she was looking for is that essence of life, and in painting it,” chief curator at the Ateneum Art Museum, Anna-Maria von Bondsdorff, says. “So, in a way, you can look at these self-portraits and see how they capture an essence of life. If you look at that one [Self-Portrait with Red Spot, 1944] it has a very small dot coming from her mouth – she is vanishing, but there is still the red dot.”
Lewison argues, convincingly, that Schjerfbeck’s work comes from a sense of grief. “I think there’s a strong sense of [it] in her work,” he says. “And although she wasn’t completely isolated, I think she had a feeling of isolation, and I think it was this grief that led her to cut herself off.
“She had this disastrous break-off and engagement… she had to look after her mother, and then her mother died. She lost her father very young, and she had this physical incapacity as a result of an accident as a young child. I think,” Lewison adds, “that all these things came into the mix.”
Helene Schjerfbeck is at the Royal Academy, London until 27 October
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