Helene Schjerfbeck
Finnish painter who stripped her own face back, decade by decade, to almost nothing.
Helene Schjerfbeck was born in Helsinki in 1862, was permanently lamed by a fall at four, and trained in Finland and Paris, where she painted realist works of considerable accomplishment while still in her twenties. Ill health and family duty took her out of the art world to a small town north of Helsinki, and in that isolation the work changed completely: the paint thinned, the drawing simplified, colour drained away, and the pictures — above all the sequence of self-portraits running from her thirties to her eighties — became progressively barer until the last ones are close to a skull. She died in Sweden in 1946.
A market centred on Finland and Sweden that has broadened considerably since the international exhibitions of the last decade. The late self-portraits are the most sought works and are largely institutional. Schjerfbeck often worked on thin grounds and scraped back to bare canvas or board, so exposed support and visible reworking are original characteristics rather than damage, and are regularly misread as such. Drawings and watercolours are numerous. Provenance is usually well documented through Finnish collections and the artist's dealers.
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