The reverse of Domenico Bossi’s miniature painting Mayor Nelander, 5.5cm x 5.5cm Sinebrychoff Collection, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Simo Karisalo

Editorial: The Art Experiment, Bodily Approaches and Material Support

Leevi Haapala, PhD, Museum Director, Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

 

6 July 2022

 

A work of art always needs a material support and structure to be presented to an audience. And art is always exhibited in specific circumstances that are framed by the cultural and political discussions of the day. In our summer edition of FNG Research, we have selected four different articles, which at first glance are not easy to categorise according to specific thematic guidelines. Still, taking them all together, the questions of materiality, objecthood and the art beholder’s presence in the shared space with the work of art, seem to be relevant even if the artworks derive from different time periods.

Materiality and the sense of touch are very topical interests for living artists, along with the intensification of societal topics. The Chief Curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma João Laia opens the key narratives in the ARS22 exhibition entitled ‘Living Encounters’. Our aim in the show was to include a multitude of different media to highlight the variety of contemporary practices, which artists are using today. At the same time, we also wanted to bring together a range of local and global geographies and in so doing making various material cultures visible. Then alongside the artefacts there is temporary live art as well as performances to create a specific atmosphere for the show. Laia reminds us in his article that ‘(b)y countering mediated forms of isolated digital connectivity with actual bodily and dialogical exchanges, these expanded live practices create spaces of communal experimentation, places of imaginative possibility where social formations can emerge in shared manners’.

Among the many works, the exhibition includes Marina Abramović and Ulay’s seminal performative experiments exploring the embeddedness of the spiritual in the bodily, which were originally presented in 1983 at the Ateneum Art Museum as a part of the ‘ARS83’ exhibition. A few black-and-white documentation photographs in our archives witness the event, and one of those is presented in the current version of the ARS22 exhibition, creating a historical link to live art practices in the show. It is fascinating to recognise that a world famous artist, like Abramović, has a history from her early days in Helsinki.

The Ateneum in its early days also ran an art school next to the museum collection in the same premises. And so the presence of naked bodies, in the anatomy classes and croquis drawing sessions, had a history in the very same gallery spaces as today’s museum. Now this early history of bodies has been researched by Laura Nissinen via the 19th-century anatomy drawings in the Finnish National Gallery’s Collections. In her article, which is the result of her internship at the Finnish National Gallery Nissinen follows different layers of bodily presentations, representations and enactments in art teaching via copies of master sculptures produced in plaster, archive materials such as photographs and drawing manuals, collections of drawings and sketches. ‘Common to the philosophical and artistic bodies is that they are both representations that reflect the thinking, skill, and aesthetic sensibility of their creator. […] The bodily representations are mirrors of humanity, expressing the values of different cultures and eras.’

The body of a painting can be studied in different ways. In this issue, Hanne Tikkala’s peer-reviewed article analyses the colour palettes and colour schemes used by two internationally renowned Finnish artists, Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Tikkala identifies and compares the contents of their pigment palettes using energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and polarised light microscopy. Shades of pigments like iron-based oranges and reds, chromium or Indian yellows and Prussian blues will appear differently via those devices and methods. Schjerfbeck and Gallen-Kallela were working at a time when new artificial pigments and colours started to replace some of the classical earth pigments. Gallen-Kallela’s travels were even possible to follow by studying more closely the pigments used and their availability at the time.

This year’s second FNG research intern Hilla Männikkö has touched in her article on the special characteristics shared by the miniatures in Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoffs’ Art Collection. These portable and intimate paintings were in their day both material and social objects, which could also be appreciated through the sense of touch. As the author highlights: ‘…especially when considering a miniature, it is important to see its tangible nature. They are not consumed solely by the eye. The connection with a miniature and its subject emerges also with touch: the size and shape are usually well fitted into the hand, which can hold it tight, lift it to be kissed or stroke its smooth surface gently.’ In our times, the closest we can get to these minute paintings is by viewing them in a display case or by exploring the digitised images, which also give access to the reverse side of the paintings that might contain personal notes, or even memorabilia.

Along with an artwork’s material existence is always the presentation of it, the framing and displaying, which are linked to the episteme of the time – the context, discourses and cultural climate, which create the surroundings for works of art. These aspects are consciously highlighted in gallery texts, academic papers and in a way how different artists and objects are curated together.

This issue’s curatorial discussion between Gill Crabbe and curator Claudia de Brün focuses on the ‘Linnaeus: Glimpses of Paradise’ exhibition, which touches on the flora and garden of art treasures at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. It’s time to enjoy the natural beauty around us and if you wish to intensify your floral experiences and deepen the understanding of the subject matter, you are welcome to admire the flower paintings inside the museum surrounded by its garden of delights.

Featured image: The reverse of Domenico Bossi’s portrait miniature Mayor Nelander, 5.5cm x 5.5cm. Sinebrychoff Collection, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Simo Karisalo
Public domain. This image of a work of art is released under a CC0 licence, and can be freely used because the copyright (70 full calendar years after the death of the artist) has expired.

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Installation view of Jenna Sutela’s I Magma, 2019, comprising head-shaped lava lamps and mobile app, on display in ‘ARS22 Living Encounters’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen

ARS22 – Living Encounters

João Laia, Chief Curator, Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

Also published in Leevi Haapala, João Laia, Jari-Pekka Vanhala (eds.), ARS22: Eläviä kohtaamisia – Living Encounters. A Museum of Contemporary Art Publication 173/2022. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma & Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2022.

We live in a time of generalised crisis. Developments in ecology, economics, health, labour, migration, politics, technology, and beyond have triggered an ‘emergency convergence’ through which these fields manifest as part of a cumulative, integrated movement. Yet despite this confluence, translated in the mutual implication and global reach of this manifold crisis, such coalition does not unify the world and its agents under identical conditions. Defined by the feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti as a technologically mediated interlinking with the ‘natural-culture continuum of our terrestrial milieu’, the webbed composition of life on Earth also includes differences regarding human geographical location and/or ‘access to social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity, and good health services’. In fact, accrued historically through processes of domination and exclusion, inequality has in recent times expanded around the world, although – and depending on their contextual inscription – each actor perceives the impacts of these intensifying tensions differently. In Braidotti’s words, ‘(t)he sexualised others (non-binary, women, LBGTQ+); the racialised others (non-Europeans, indigenous); and the naturalised others (animals, plants, the Earth)’ have permanently throughout history been closer to any given crisis.[1]

The urgent features of the current situation have given rise to a generalised sense of anxiety and menace. For Braidotti, ‘(e)xhaustion and fatigue – a recurrent sense of hopelessness and impossibility – have become prominent features of the contemporary psychic landscapes’, functioning as ‘witnesses to the daily and nightly struggles to come to terms with what our world has become and the complexities of our historical context’. The accumulation and overlapping of fatigue, fear, and despair generates feelings of impotence, ‘a social and psychological dimming of a sense of possibility, which triggers a systemic fragmentation and a shattering of our relational capacity’.[2] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi also identifies a current inability emotionally and rationally to process current events, whose speed is intensifying, leading to nervous overstimulation. Berardi names this state of things ‘chaos’, articulating it as both ‘the measure of the complexity of the world in relation to the capacities of intellectual reduction’ and ‘the excessive density of the infosphere in relation to the psychosphere’.[3] Such argument adds the imprint of technology to the context described by Braidotti, underlining how the digitally led exponential increase of information flows has contributed to the exhaustion of the contemporary psychic landscape and an erosion of collective affinities.

[1] Rosi Braidotti. ‘“We” Are in This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same’, Bioethical Inquiry 17 (2020), 465–69.

[2] Braidotti, ‘“We’ Are in This Together…’, 465–69.

[3] Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. London and New York: Verso, 2017, 2.

Featured image: Installation view of Jenna Sutela’s I Magma, 2019, comprising head-shaped lava lamps and mobile app, on display in ‘ARS22 Living Encounters’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen

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’ARS22 Living Encounters’, until 16 October 2022, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki

Leevi Haapala, João Laia, Jari-Pekka Vanhala (eds.), ARS22: Eläviä kohtaamisia – Living Encounters. A Museum of Contemporary Art Publication 173/2022. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma & Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2022, available from the Finnish National Gallery’s webshop, https://museoshop.fi/en/product/ars22-elavia-kohtaamisia-living-encounters/

Jean-Michel Picart, Still life of Flowers, 1600–82, oil on canvas, 35cm x 48.5cm. Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

The Flowering of Science and Art

Gill Crabbe, FNG Research

Flower painting in the western canon of art became an independent genre in the 17th century. As the Sinebrychoff Art Museum displays its exhibition ‘Linnaeus: Glimpses of Paradise’, Gill Crabbe asks curator Claudia de Brün about the research involved in developing themes for the show

The Sinebrychoff Art Museum’s ability to tend its garden of art treasures and cultivate innovative exhibition material continues with its wide-ranging show on the theme of the Northern garden, flower painting and its relation to science, ‘Linnaeus: Glimpses of Paradise’. From its own prize possessions of 17th-century flower paintings by artists such as the Dutch master Johannes Borman, court painter to Louis XIV Jean-Michel Picart, and the workshop of the supreme Dutch master Jan Brueghel I, the museum has negotiated loans of significant works in the genre from Northern European museums to complement them. The show’s theme opens out to include floral elements in religious art, the importance of botanical illustration, the meeting of art and science in the vision of the iconic Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and how floral themes appeared not only via the art that Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff collected but also in the decorative and functional pieces that adorned their everyday life.

There is also the contextual theme of paradise – the word’s original meaning of a walled area or garden being rooted in ancient Iranian language – which takes in the socio-political developments of colonial nations during the 17th and 18th centuries. Exotic plants and species were brought back from voyages of discovery for wealthy elites to create ornamental gardens, with walled enclosures, trees and water fountains providing a haven from the wild nature beyond. In the exhibition, the paintings of such earthly delights as a pineapple plant that bloomed in 1729 at the gardens of royal palace of Ulriksdal near Stockholm, by the Swedish artist David von Cöln (1689–1763), the anthological florilegia of the 16th and 17th centuries, and Hieronymus Francken II’s Connoisseurs at a Gallery, all serve as examples to underline the specific value of plants as collectors’ items in this period.

Featured image: Jean-Michel Picart, Still life of Flowers, 1600–82, oil on canvas, 35cm x 48.5cm. Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis
Public domain. This image of a work of art is released under a CC0 licence, and can be freely used because the copyright (70 full calendar years after the death of the artist) has expired.

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Beckmann’s Syntonos-Colours sales catalogue. Akseli Gallen-Kallela Archive, Gallen-Kallela Museum, Espoo Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hanne Tikkala

Indian Yellow and Titanium White – A Material-centred Perspective on the Pigments Used by Artists Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen-Kallela in the 1920s

Hanne Tikkala, corresponding author, MA, PhD student, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, Senior researcher, Finnish National Gallery, Materials research laboratory (hanne.tikkala@fng.fi), and Seppo Hornytzkyj, MSc, PhD student, University of Helsinki, supervisor of this research

This article presents the results of material studies focused on identifying and comparing the contents of the pigment palettes of two notable Finnish painters, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) and Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931). The research methods used comprise energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (EDXRF) and polarised light microscopy (PLM). In addition, certain pigments have been identified in colour areas of the works using specular reflection FT-infrared spectrometry (FTIR) and Raman spectrometry.[1] To support the results gathered using scientific analytical methods, archival research has been conducted in order to find notes and references to the pigments made by the artists themselves.

Prior to the research, the main composition of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s pigment palette was identified using the first two of the aforementioned analytical methods. The results of the research study in question were presented in the online journal of the Society for Art History in Finland Tahiti, published in March 2020.[2] A similar research project began in the autumn of 2020 in order to identify the composition of Helene Schjerfbeck’s pigment palette. The research is ongoing and the results will be published over the coming years.

[1] All the methods used are non-invasive and/or non-destructive.

[2] Hanne Tikkala and Seppo Hornytzkyj. ‘Luonnontieteellisin analyysimenetelmin tunnistettu Akseli Gallen-Kallelan väripaletti’, Tahiti, 10(1), 5–55, https://doi.org/10.23995/tht.90554 (accessed 7 June 2022).

Featured image: Beckmann’s Syntonos-Colours sales catalogue. Akseli Gallen-Kallela Archive, Gallen-Kallela Museum, Espoo
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hanne Tikkala

Read more — Download ‘Indian Yellow and Titanium White – A Material-centred Perspective on the Pigments Used by Artists Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen-Kallela in the 1920s’, by Hanne Tikkala, as a PDF

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Anders Ekman, Study of Eyes, before 1855 Lilli Törnudd Archive. Archive Collections, Finnish National Gallery Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Ainur Nasretdin

The Ateneum to the Backbone – 19th-Century Anatomy Drawings in the Finnish National Gallery Collections

Laura Nissinen, Doctor of Arts, MA student, University of Helsinki

This article is published following the author’s three-month research internship at the Finnish National Gallery

Introduction

The skull

A group of nine young women wearing skirts and aprons are sitting in an empty interior. Beside them is a drawing on an easel, depicting a female form. Several electric lamps with shades made from bent cardboard are hanging from the ceiling. Most of the women have their heads turned away from the camera, and instead are looking at the person sitting in the middle of the group, who holds a human skull in her lap. She holds the skull softly, almost tenderly, in her hands, looking down at it intensively. Three of the women are holding large palettes and long-handled paintbrushes. No-one is smiling.

The scene described is the subject of a photograph taken in the Ateneum Art Museum in 1894. A short text, handwritten in Swedish, can be seen at the bottom of the backing card framing the photo: ‘In the atelier, spring 1894’[1] (Fig. 1). The space shown in the picture is the hall located on the third floor of the Ateneum, built in 1887. At the time the photo was taken, the hall was the painting studio of the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School. The women in the photograph are students and the barefoot person sitting a little apart from the group is the model, her face familiar from the unfinished drawing on the easel. The group’s teacher, Elin Danielson, is squatting in front of the group, her dark dress carefully folded around her feet. She is looking closely at the person holding the skull, who is her cousin Onni Bäckström. The serious mood and the position of the skull create a strange atmosphere. Still, the reason for presenting the skull in the picture is the same as showing us the painting palettes and brushes. These women want us to know that they are artists.

The skull, or in other words the head of someone who once loved, dreamed, and sang, may look eerie to us today, but for an art student in the 19th century it would have been a common subject. In fact, the history of the skulls, skeletons, and other bone fragments placed in the service of artists’ tuition is as long as the narrative of the art academies, dating back to the 16th century.[2] Their role was to demonstrate what we humans are made of, the correct bodily measurements, and how the parts functioned together when people moved. These human remains worked as lifeless models doomed patiently to serve art seemingly for an eternity.

The body of research

At the beginning of my internship my research interest was the relation between art and science in the 19th century, but the topic was too extensive and needed a new focus that would suit the Finnish National Gallery’s Art Collection and Archival Collections.[3] When my tutors, senior researcher Hanna-Leena Paloposki and curator Anne-Maria Pennonen, suggested the theme of anatomy, I knew it was just the idea I had been looking for. This solution helped to define the research focus and to identify the relevant material in the National Gallery’s large collections. In addition to skeletons, I searched for other anatomical subjects, such as studies of muscles and other drawings of human bodies, body parts and of objects depicting human bodies. To limit the amount of the material I chose to focus on works representing inanimate models and objects, leaving aside works made using live models. The final selected material includes anatomical studies of the human body, drawings of bodily representations copied from drawing books or drawing manuals or similar examples, and drawings copied from plaster casts (Fig. 2). As there has been no previous research on the topic of anatomy concerning the collections of the Finnish National Gallery, the first research questions were all about the visual material: what kind of imagery relating to the theme of human anatomy exists in the Art Collection and Archive Collections of the National Gallery, by whom and from what period? The subsequent questions I have attempted to answer are more extensive: how did the emphasis on the human form manifest itself in the artist’s education in the 19th century and what kind of knowledge of the human body was considered important to the artists of the time?

This article is developed taking into consideration a relatively large amount of imagery. In the Art Collection and Archive Collections of the Finnish National Gallery, studies of skeletons and muscles can be found by Robert Wilhelm Ekman (1808–73), Carl Eneas Sjöstrand (1828–1906), Anders Ekman (1833–55), Maria Wiik (1853–1928), Gunnar Berndtson (1854–95), Albert Edelfelt (1854–1905), and Magnus Enckell (1870–1925). I have also found works copied from drawing manuals by Anders Ekman, Oscar Kleineh (1846–1919), Maria Wiik, Albert Edelfelt, Torsten Wasastjerna (1863–1924) and Pekka Halonen (1865–1933). Drawings copied from plaster casts also exist by Arvid Liljelund (1844–99), Oscar Kleineh, Gunnar Berndtson, and Torsten Wasastjerna. In addition, there are some individual drawings on the topic by Ferdinand von Wright (1822–1906), Johannes Takanen (1849–85), Alfred William Finch (1854–1930), and Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946).

The list of the artists or works in this article is not exhaustive due to the time frame of my internship. Quite probably, there is further material relating to the theme of anatomy in the Finnish National Gallery’s vast collections. This article doesn’t include finished works of art in the traditional sense. The majority of the works presented are student works, made during the first years of artistic training. The date of the works is not certain in all cases and only a small part of the imagery has been exhibited or published before. Still, most of the visual material displayed in this research article has been digitised and catalogued in the Finnish National Gallery’s collection management system.

[1] The original text in Swedish: ‘På atelieren våren 1894’.

[2] Susanna Pettersson. Suomen Taideyhdistyksestä Ateneumiin. Fredrik Cygnaeus, Carl Gustaf Estlander ja taidekokoelman roolit. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden seura, Valtion taidemuseo, 2008, 158; Altti Kuusamo. ‘Akatemian idea ja taiteiden järjestelmä’, in Riikka Stewen (ed.), Silmän oppivuodet. Ajatuksia taiteesta ja taiteen opettamisesta. Helsinki: Kuvataideakatemia 1998, 23–24.

[3] The Finnish National Gallery is Finland’s national cultural institution, which comprises the Ateneum Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Sinebrychoff Art Museum. It maintains the Finnish National Gallery Collection, which includes artworks, archival materials, and artefacts. The Ateneum Art Museum’s Art Collection presents the development of Finnish art from the 18th century to the 20th century.

Featured image: Anders Ekman, Study of eyes, before 1855
Lilli Törnudd Archive. Archive Collections, Finnish National Gallery
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Ainur Nasretdin

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Peter Adolf Hall (1739–93), Portrait of a Young Man, watercolour and gouache on ivory, 3.7cm x 2.9cm Sinebrychoff Collection, Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Simo Karisalo

Mementos on Display: Portrait Miniatures in the Sinebrychoffs’ Art Collection

Hilla Männikkö, MA student, University of Helsinki

This article is published following the author’s three-month research internship at the Finnish National Gallery

Introduction

There are very few people who haven’t felt moved when looking at a picture of their loved one. A face, especially when belonging to someone dear, has the power to evoke a multitude of feelings: love, anger, possessiveness or heartache, to name a few. As we live in the contemporary world, this type of picture is usually a photograph. In my primary school we used to wait for the days when a photographer came to take the annual school photographs. We sat for the group picture, pictures with our friends and our portrait pictures with hair brushed and a smile elicited by the funny word. After a few weeks, the photos arrived and it was time to call on our courage and ask for a little sticker photo from our secret (or not-so-secret) crush. If we were lucky enough to obtain one, it was cherished. I stuck mine between the back of my phone and the battery to keep it always with me, but hidden from meaningful glances.

This ritual from my childhood nearly 20 years ago reminds me of portrait miniatures and their use as personal mementos across several centuries. Before the invention of photographs these items held a great sentimental value and were in active use in strengthening emotional bonds between lovers and family members. During my internship at the Finnish National Gallery I have acquainted myself with these small gems and their character.

I chose to study Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff’s collection of miniatures that is housed at the Sinebrychoff Art Museum as a part of Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff’s art collection. Today the National Gallery’s entire collection of miniatures comprises about 400 items, of which around 340 belong to the original collection by Paul and Fanny. Their original miniature collection was formed over roughly two decades – from the end of the 1880s to c. 1913 – and was then donated to the Finnish state in 1921.[1] Since the original donation the collection in the National Gallery has been increased by several further donations and purchases.

The collection of miniatures has been previously researched, but the main focus has been on basic and conservatory research on how the collection was formed and what it actually includes in terms of artists and materials.[2] Even though this work is still in progress, in this article my aim is not to make a thorough report on the collection or its developments, but rather to study it from several thematic viewpoints. First of all, I will approach a portrait miniature as an object that has a certain character. I will examine it as a material and social object and place it in the context of the Sinebrychoffs’ collecting interests. Here, I will reflect on the question of what kinds of qualities make the portrait miniature an appealing object for both the original owner and the collector. How do their experiences differ and what do they have in common?

I have approached these questions by sifting through some parts of the Finnish National Gallery Archive Collections, studying research literature on the material and social aspects of portrait miniatures and taking a closer look at Paul Sinebrychoff’s letters from equivalent viewpoints.[3] I have also had the opportunity to examine Paul’s own original catalogue of their miniatures, the catalogue of the collection made after Fanny’s donation, as well as auction catalogues from Bukowski’s auction house in Sweden. There is still a variety of archive material on the Sinebrychoff collection that would require further research in the future which could also shed light on the issues concerned in this article.

The Sinebrychoffs’ collection of miniatures contains mainly portrait miniatures but also some examples of other genres, such as mythological scenes. In my research I have concentrated on the original part of the collection collected by Paul and Fanny. From the vast amount of objects, I have chosen portrait miniatures that depict private individuals and were commissioned as personal keepsakes as the ones to be presented in this article. Thus in the later sections, when discussing miniatures in general, I will not consider portraits of sovereigns or other socialites, which play a considerable role in the history of miniatures but whose function differs significantly from that of their more private counterparts. Finally, I have highlighted some items from the collection, which best express the social or material aspects of miniatures that are the focus of this article.

[1] This timing of active collecting is based on information gathered from Paul’s letters and submitted to the author as a verbal notice by curator Reetta Kuojärvi-Närhi, who has studied the Sinebrychoffs’ collecting activities in depth. On the donation, see Ira Westergård. ‘A gift to the nation: Fanny Sinebrychoff and the donation of the Sinebrychoff art collection’, in Salla Heino, Kirsi Eskelinen (eds.), A Bulevardi Home – Art Collectors Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff. Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Sinebrychoff Art Museum, 2021, (212–31) 221.

[2] See e.g. Reetta Kuojärvi-Närhi & Synnöve Malmström (eds.). Miniatyyrit. Helsinki: Valtion taidemuseo, 2002.

[3] I have used the letters from the years 1895 to 1909, about 477 items in total, which can be found translated into Finnish and transcribed on the web-page Paul Sinebrychoffin kirjearkisto [Paul Sinebrychoff’s Letter Archive], http://kirjearkisto.siff.fi/default.aspx (accessed 15 June 2022).

Featured image: Peter Adolf Hall (1739–93), Portrait of a Young Man,
watercolour and gouache on ivory, 3.7cm x 2.9cm
Sinebrychoff Collection, Finnish National Gallery /
Sinebrychoff Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Simo Karisalo
Public domain. This image of a work of art is released under a CC0 licence, and can be freely used because the copyright (70 full calendar years after the death of the artist) has expired.

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