The Ateneum Art museum appears on nearly every list of must-sees in Helsinki for good reason. Its grand halls and sculpture-adorned façade make it a sight worth seeing, but don’t stop at merely admiring the exterior.  Within its ornate walls is an unmissable experience for visitors; nowhere else can you enjoy such a thorough perspective of […]

Profane art (or secular art) had its hesitant origin in Finland in the 18th century Isak Wacklin’s rococo portraits and in Nils Schillmark’s paintings, which employed the Neoclassical idiom. Elias Martin’s landscape paintings documenting the fortification of Viapori represent a unique curiosity from the same period. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Finnish artists absorbed influences from the […]

The influence of plein-air painting The adoption of the plein-air method drove Finnish artists out into the midst of the peasantry and into the natural landscape. Artists, who usually had an upper-class background, began to make excursions into the “original Finland” that was supposed to lie in the forest wilderness of Karelia. Romanticism Landscape painting […]