Finland — Snow, Lakes and Myths

Does this image seem vaguely familiar? There’s a very similar painting in the National Gallery in London.

It’s by the Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and it depicts Lake Keitele in the centre of the country at the start of the 20th century; an apparently peaceful and isolated midsummer scene, seemingly devoid of the impact of man. He made several versions of this picture.

But as so often in art, a painting can be more than it appears at first glance, as we were to find out in Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland at the Belvedere in Vienna. Those zigzag lines on the water are a natural phenomenon created by the wind and the currents, but the artist uses them to give his work a far deeper meaning. When he painted this, Finland was still a Russian possession, and Gallen-Kallela was heavily involved in the Finnish nationalist movement. For him, those stripes represented the traces left by the boat rowed across the lake by the old sage, Väinämöinen, in the Finnish national epic and foundation myth, the Kalevala.

So though we went to see Gallen-Kallela in search of glorious landscapes (and we weren’t disappointed), we found something more: an artistic worldview steeped in a deep sense of patriotism and myth. Curiously, Gallen-Kallela didn’t actually come from an ethnic Finnish background but from the Swedish-speaking minority; he was born Axel Gallén in 1865 and changed his name to a Finnish version in 1907 (Also curiously, a couple of other leading Finnish painters of the era you might be aware of — Helene Schjerfbeck and Albert Edelfelt — were ethnic Swedes too).

This show takes us back through Gallen-Kallela’s career, which started with depictions of nature and people in rural Finland. There’s a sense of deprivation running through many of these pictures, but the same could have been said of almost anywhere in many countries in the late 19th century. An Old Woman with a Cat stands by a fence, her face deeply lined, her feet gnarled and bare, her apron full of holes. The entire palette is earthy.

Boy with a Crow reminded us of the Glasgow Boys, heavily influenced by French realism.

But of these early pictures, perhaps the one that’s most eye-catching is Imatra in Winter.

The rapids on the River Vouksi at Imatra in south-east Finland are one of the country’s landmarks and back in January 1893 the Imatra hydropower company floodlit the rapids at night and invited journalists and artists to record the dramatic scene. A natural spectacle took on the force of an event filled with Finnish technological expertise and nationalist political symbolism; that aside, what a depiction of snow, ice and surging water this is.

As you go through this show, you get an insight into the rural life of the artist and his family. You’ll see a photo of Gallen-Kallela posing on skis above a lake, looking perhaps not quite the man of the hills (they don’t really have mountains in Finland), but certainly aiming to present himself as someone who belongs in this rugged environment. He and his wife built a studio home by a lake; he painted her sewing on the veranda, her face veiled as protection from the mosquitoes. He designed furniture and textiles for the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, inspired by traditional patterns.

Gallen-Kallela started painting scenes from the Kalevala in the early 1890s, and his first large-scale work was a triptych of the Aino Myth, depicting the white-bearded old sage Väinämöinen (we had him at the start of this post) and his pursuit of the maiden Aino. She turns herself into a water sprite to escape him. Then, when out fishing, Väinämöinen catches Aino in the shape of a perch, but she slips away again. Displayed at the Paris Salon, this somewhat realistically painted piece of obscure mythology (with two nude Ainos) left audiences baffled.

The artist then developed a rather more stylised approach. These are odd-looking works, cartoon-like in some ways, and in many cases not very easy to like. The descriptions of what’s going on in them have the air of those plot summaries you get on the back of the latest instalment in a series of two-inch-thick fantasy novels (apologies to any Finns who might be offended by this). But without the descriptions you’d be hard pushed to know what was going on.

In this one, we learn from the wall caption, the young adventurous hero Lemminkäinen has tried to kill a swan in the river in the realm of the dead. He’s torn to pieces, but his mother rushes to rescue him and stick his body back together. A bee brings the divine balm of life to revive the hero.

If you think it reminds you of the crucified Jesus and the Virgin Mary, you wouldn’t be wrong.

Meanwhile, in another episode, a further key Kalevala character, Juokahainen, has his crossbow loaded ready to take revenge on Väinämöinen, who’s defeated him in a singing duel. His mother is trying to hold him back. “Don’t do it, son, he’s not worth it.”

There are influences of Symbolism and Art Nouveau in Gallen-Kallela’s work, and notably so in a series of frescoes that he was commissioned to paint in 1899 for a mausoleum in Pori, on Finland’s west coast, for Sigrid, the daughter of an industrialist called Fritz Arthur Jusélius. The originals were destroyed in a fire in the 1930s, but on display in Vienna are the large-scale designs depicting the cycle of birth, life and death. There are scenes of nature as well as more mysterious and symbol-laden images, such as Spring, with its ominous black-clad young woman on the left. And what’s the boy about to shoot with his crossbow that the small children on the right are looking at so intently?

Gallen-Kallela exhibited with the Viennese Secessionists, and you can see in this show how the ideas flowed between them; let’s get back to the landscape pictures, where you might notice affinities between the Finn and the likes of Gustav Klimt and Ferdinand Hodler.

Here’s another one of those lake views; the clouds, the water, the trees, the muted sunlight.

That’s the wide-angle view; here’s a close-up: a painting that really deserves its title Spring.

Gallen-Kallela has captured that very essence of the season when the sun can be quite bright, casting sharp shadows, and surprisingly warm, melting the thick layers of snow to reveal brownish grass or soil. We almost expected a big drop of water to fall on our heads from one of the trees, just like when you are out in Northern European forests in early March. So Spring is here. And in a very short time it will be Summer, with clouds in a bright blue sky.

Summer in Finland. Looks fantastic.

Practicalities

Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Picturing Finland is on at the Belvedere in Vienna until February 2. This show is in the Lower Belvedere, which is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Tickets are cheaper online — a standard 14.60 euros instead of 17 euros at the museum ticket counter on the day. We spent an hour in the exhibition, which wasn’t very busy on a weekday morning.

If you want to also see the permanent collection (including Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss), that’s in a different building, the Upper Belvedere, several minutes walk away across the formal gardens. There’s a separate ticket for the Upper Belvedere, and you’ll need to reserve a timeslot (it gets pretty busy in there). You can get a 2-in-1 day ticket for both locations for 25.90 euros online (28.90 euros at the museum on the day). If you expect to make a couple of trips to Vienna within 12 months, it’s worth checking out the Belvedere’s good-value annual tickets.

An exhibition reflecting Gallen-Kallela’s interaction with the Secessionists in Vienna, featuring some of the same artworks, as well as more by Klimt and other Austrian artists, can be seen at the Ateneum in Helsinki from September 26 to February 1, 2026 under the title Gallen-Kallela, Klimt & Wien.

Images

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), Lake Keitele, 1904, Private collection. Photo: Gallen-Kallela Museum, Espoo/Jukka Paavola
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Boy with a Crow, 1884, Photo: Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki/Yehia Eweis
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Imatra in Winter, 1893, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lemminkäinen‘s Mother, 1897. Photo: Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki/Hannu Pakarinen
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Spring (Study for the Juselius Mausoleum frescoes), 1903. Photo: Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki/Jenni Nurminen
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lake View, 1901. Photo: Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki/Hannu Pakarinen
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Spring, c. 1900. Photo: Belvedere, Vienna
Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Clouds, 1904. Photo: Didrichsen Art Museum/Rauno Träskelin

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