Works by Albert Edelfelt
200 works · 240 ms
Albert Edelfelt almost entirely gave up history painting for work in the open air, catching the light of Paris parks and the Finnish shore with a realist's care for detail.
He trained in Helsinki and Antwerp, then from 1874 in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme. Burnt Village, his first Salon success in 1879, has a young woman peering round a snowy rock at smoke in the distance, while an old man on a sledge and a child wait behind her. Edelfelt felt that a past he had not seen could never look as true as life, and he almost entirely dropped history. His friend Jules Bastien-Lepage introduced him to painting outdoors.
In The Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, from 1887, a woman in black does a red-haired girl's hair as the girl holds a hoop, and two children squat over a pail on the sunlit gravel. Summers he spent in Finland, from 1883 with a studio at Haikko near Porvoo, where his family had a house. In Conveying the Child's Coffin a rowing boat carries a small pale-blue coffin across calm water, a girl beside it holding a few yellow flowers.
Portraits paid the bills, "portraits for the soup" as he put it in 1878, borrowing from Antoine Wiertz. Each began as pencil and crayon studies, then pastels, before the oil. In the 1890s he took to illustrating poetry, among it Runeberg's Tales of Ensign Stål; in one ink and gouache sheet, an old woman in a white cap watches a man study candlelit portraits. Most works here are portraits and figure scenes in oil or pastel, with a few drawings.
Sources: Wikipedia, Finnish National Gallery, National Museum of Finland.
