Helene Schjerfbeck valuation
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.
What a work by Helene Schjerfbeck is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 10 July 1862, Helsinki
- Died
- 23 January 1946, Saltsjöbaden
- Movement
- Realism
More on Wikipedia.
Stenman, Tammisaari and the Royal Academy
The young dealer Gösta Stenman visited her at Hyvinkää in 1913 and brought her back into view: he organised her first solo exhibition, in Helsinki in 1917, and later a second in Stockholm in 1938. She moved to Tammisaari on the south coast in 1925 and died in Sweden in 1946. The Ateneum in Helsinki holds the largest collection, and the Royal Academy in London gave her an exhibition in 2019.
Stenman also commissioned new versions of some of her earlier pictures, so a composition can exist more than once, painted decades apart. Exhibition labels and dealers' records, his above all, are often what place a particular version.
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