Background
Schjerfbeck was born in Helsinki, Grand Duchy of Finland (now Finland), on July 10, 1862. She was the daughter of Svante Schjerfbeck, an office manager, and Olga Johanna Schjerfbeck (née Printz).
Elimäenkatu 25 A, 00510 Helsinki, Finland
Helene Schjerfbeck was enrolled at the Finnish Art Society Drawing School (now the University of the Arts Helsinki).
Elimäenkatu 25 A, 00510 Helsinki, Finland
Helene Schjerfbeck was enrolled at the Finnish Art Society Drawing School (now the University of the Arts Helsinki).
Schjerfbeck was born in Helsinki, Grand Duchy of Finland (now Finland), on July 10, 1862. She was the daughter of Svante Schjerfbeck, an office manager, and Olga Johanna Schjerfbeck (née Printz).
When Helene Schjerfbeck was a four-year-old girl, she suffered a hip injury. It prevented her from studying at school. She showed her artistic talent at an early age and began her studies at the age of eleven when she was enrolled at the Finnish Art Society Drawing School (now the University of the Arts Helsinki). Her studies were paid by Adolf von Becker, a Finnish genre painter and art professor, who saw promise in her. At the school, Schjerfbeck met Helena Westermarck, a Finnish artist and writer.
Schjerfbeck’s father died of tuberculosis on February 2, 1876. A little over a year after his death, she graduated from the Finnish Art Society drawing school. Helene Schjerfbeck continued her studies with Westermarck at a private academy, which was run by Adolf von Becker. The lessons were held in the University of Helsinki drawing studio. Professor G. Asp paid for her tuition under von Becker. There, Adolf von Becker taught her French oil painting techniques.
In 1879, she was awarded the third prize in a competition held by the Finnish Art Society. In 1880 Schjerfbeck’s work was presented in an annual Finnish Art Society exhibition. That summer Schjerfbeck spent time at a manor possessed by her aunt on her mother’s side, Selma Printz, and Selma’s husband Thomas Adlercreutz. There she created portraits of her cousins. Later that year she received a travel grant from the Imperial Russian Senate and went to Paris.
In Paris, Schjerfbeck studied with Léon Bonnat at Mme Trélat de Vigny’s studio. In 1881 she transferred to the Académie Colarossi, where she studied under the guidance of Edvard Westermarck. The Imperial Senate presented her another scholarship. She spent a couple of months in Meudon, and then a few more months in Concarneau, Brittany. She then returned to the Académie Colarossi for some time, before coming back to the Adlercreutz family estate in Finland.
Schjerfbeck moved around frequently, painting and studying with various people. She painted at Meudon and in Great Britain until summer 1882. Schjerfbeck made money by continuing to put her paintings in the Art Society’s exhibitions, and she also produced illustrations for books. During her second visit to France in 1884-1885, Helene Schjerfbeck displayed her works for the first time at the famous Spring Salon in Paris, Fête juive ('Tabernacles'; 1883), and again spent time painting in Great Britain.
Helene Schjerfbeck's early artworks were of considerable significance for Finnish art. Despite the fact that she wanted to compete in the field of 'high' art with her large historical works, she sometimes also depicted subjects which the public regarded as trivial. In such paintings, one can clearly see the influence of that period French art, with its striving towards a freer type of artistic expression. Some of the paintings produced in the United Kingdom were exceptionally minimalist for the European art of the period.
In the 1880s even Helene Schjerfbeck's closest fellow artists still did not understand her experiments, and eventually she abandoned this style of painting for some time. However, quite soon she came back to it. In 1884 Schjerfbeck was back in Paris at the Académie Colarossi with Westermarck, but this time they were working there. In 1887 she traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, England. There she created The Convalescent, which was later bought by the Finnish Art Society. At this period Schjerfbeck was painting in a naturalistic plein-air style.
In the 1890s she started teaching regularly in Finland at the Art Society drawing school, however, in 1901 she had serious problems with her health and was not able to teach. Thus, in 1902 she resigned her post. She moved to Hyvinkää, all while taking care of her mother who lived with her. While living in Hyvinkää, she continued to paint and exhibit. During this time the artist produced still lifes and landscapes, as well as portraits, such as that of her mother, local school girls and women workers, and also self-portraits, and she became a modernist painter.
At the end of the century a new trend began to emerge in her artworks. The dim lighting and restrained colours introduced into Nordic art by symbolism. There was a clear change in her paintings dating from the 1890s, as their lines became more delicate, the colours more simple and the subjects more intimate; Helene Schjerfbeck was not as productive as she had been before. The 1900s were a period of transition to the stylised modernism. She continued experimenting with various techniques such as using different types of underpainting.
She was longing for peace and silence, and from 1902 to 1917 she didn't left Hyvinkää. She lost contact with artists in Helsinki, however, she maintained her ties with "sister artists" from her student days, particularly with Helena Westermarck and Ada Thilén.
In the year, 1913 Helene Schjerfbeck met the art-dealer, Gösta Stenman, with whose promotion she exhibited at Malmö in 1914, Stockholm in 1916 and Saint Petersburg in 1917. Through Stenman, Schjerfbeck regained a living contact with modern art. During her first visit to Helsinki for a long time, she saw paintings by Cézanne and Paul Gauguin at the National Gallery and went to an exhibition of French art. She was particularly interested in the works of Henri Matisse and Othon Friesz.
In 1917 Stenman organized her first personal exhibition; and the same year Einar Reuter (alias H. Ahtela) published the first Schjerfbeck monograph. Later she exhibited her artworks in Copenhagen (1919), Gothenburg (1923) and Stockholm (1934). In 1937 Stenman organized another solo exhibition for her in Stockholm. This was followed by a series of similar exhibitions around Sweden. In 1938 Stenman began paying her a monthly salary.
The American exhibition of 1939 was cancelled because of the onset of the Second World War, although in 1942 a large jubilee exhibition took place at Stenman's in Stockholm. During the war years Helene Schjerfbeck lived first at Tenhola (Tenala), then in the Loviisa (Lovisa) area and then, from early 1942 onwards at the Luontola sanatorium at Nummela. In February 1944 Gösta Stenman organized her travel to Sweden. Helene Schjerfbeck spent the final years of her life at the spa hotel at Saltsjöbaden. She painted energetically up to the end; her Saltsjöbaden works include a final burst of self-portraits.
Today Helene Schjerfbeck is established as one of the 'greats' of Finnish art, and since the 1990s her work has begun to attract interest outside the Nordic countries. Her works were exhibited in a number of countries, including shows in her native Finland, as well as Sweden, and Paris.
Her work The Convalescent won the bronze medal at the 1889 Paris World Fair. Dancing Shoes is considered to be one of Schjerfbeck's most enduringly popular paintings. It fetched £3,044,500 at a 2008 Sotheby's London sale. Another well-known artwork titled Girl with Blonde Hair realized £869,000 at a 2015 Sotheby's London sale.
Girl from California
Smiling Girl
Maria
Girl With Blue Ribbon
Girl Reading
Self-portrait with Black Background
Portrait of a Girl
Blond Woman
Girl from Loviisa
Katkelma
Rosy-Cheeked Girl
Siblings
The Neck of a Little Girl
Portrait of a Girl
Nurse I (Kaija Lahtinen)
Three Pears in a Vase
Self-Portrait With Black Mouth
Self-Portrait
The Convalescent
Under the Linden
Portrait of a Girl
Girl Fishing
A Boy Feeding his Younger Sister
Mother and Child
School Girl in Black
At Home Mother Sewing
Old Woman
Dancing Shoes
Lilies of the Valley in a Blue Vase II
Forty Year Old
The Seamstress (The Working Woman)
The Gipsy Woman
Portrait of a Girl
Portrait of a Girl in Blue and Brown (Inez)
Circus Girl
Picking Bluebells
Girl from Eydtkuhnen II
Seated Woman in White Dress
Friends
Girl From the Islands
The Fortune-Teller (Woman in Yellow Dress)
Green Bench
Stilhet
The Family Heirloom
The Teacher
Still Life in Green
Annuli Reading
Portrait of a Child
Quotations:
"One should paint with feelers, not with brushes and fingers."
"A work of art always lacks the last few details; the finished is dead."
"We do not [need to] list every detail; a hint brings us closer to the truth."
Quotes from others about the person
Roberta Smith: "Her [Helene Schjerfbeck's] work starts with a dazzlingly skilled, somewhat melancholic version of late-19th-century academic realism... it ends with distilled, nearly abstract images in which pure paint and cryptic description are held in perfect balance."
In England Helene Schjerfbeck met an English painter, it is not known who he was, and became engaged to him. But her fiancé broke off the engagement in 1885, because his relatives suspected that her hip defect was of a tubercular nature. Schjerfbeck remained single, though she did not consider this aspect of her life as good. The fact that she had no children was particularly sad for her. She later thought of adopting a child, but the plan was ruined by the hostility of her environment.
