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To be sold at Uppsala Auktionskammare’s Important Sale Week 10 – 13 December 2024
Lot 813 Helene Schjerfbeck (Finland 1862‑1946). ”Hyresvärden som ung” (The Landlord as a Young Man). Signed with monogram and dated HS 45 lower right. Watercolour heightened with white and charcoal on paper, 59 x 41.5 cm (paper).
Executed in 1945.
With inscription in pencil on the reverse: ”Hyresvärden som ung, akv. & gouache 54 x 39.5” and ”5382”.
With inscription on the supporting board in pencil: ”Doktorinnan Karin Axén, Allmänna sjukhuset, Malmö.”
Compare with the oil on canvas ”Hyresvärden som ung” from 1926 in Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki.
The collection of art dealer Gösta Stenman (1888‑1947), inv. no. 5382.
A Swedish private collection.
Stenmans Konstsalong, ”Helene Schjerfbeck. Utställning Canada och USA 1949-1953”, according to label cat. no. 135.
Gotthard Johansson, Helene Schjerfbecks konst, 1940, compare with the 1926 painting illustrated.
H. Ahtela, Helena Schjerfbeck, 1953, p. 371, no. 980 in the catalogue.
When Helene Schjerfbeck is summing up her artistic career, her grand finale consists of a series of intriguing self-portraits where she explores her own ageing, but also some new interpretations of her own previous compositions. In her last years, in the absence of other models, she depicted herself more and more often. She also repeatedly returned to previous compositions, further developing them. The realism of her youth turned into progressive modernist explorations.
Schjerfbeck’s life was characterized by the serious atmosphere in her home and the early feeling of alienation and loneliness. Due to a hip injury in early ages, Schjerfbeck could not attend regular school and was homeschooled, which is believed to have strengthened her sense of exclusion. This feeling was something that would follow her throughout her life.
Due to the war, her patron and art dealer Gösta Stenman and his wife Bertha, helped transferring Schjerfbeck to Sweden in 1944. She stayed at Saltsjöbadens badhotell, in a greater material comfort than ever before, but she felt isolated. Stenman supported her with artistic material and she produced an incredible volume of works during this time. At her respectable age, it was truly remarkable. She painted around twenty self-portraits, in which she entered into dialogue with approaching death. Her reinterpretations of her earlier works, new still life paintings and the view from her room, all reflects a painter who lived her life through art. With an increased artistic sensibility, from a person that throughout her life had had to struggle with difficulties and whose essence from the beginning had been the signature of the fragile; is finishing strong. With admiration we esteem her remarkably ability to conclude her achievement at height.
In 1925 Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Tammisaari and stayed there until 1941. Finding models for her paintings was more difficult in Tammisaari and she was fascinated by the appearance of her landlord Eskil Bäckman. She used him as model for at least three compositions; “Hyresvärden som ung,” “Hyresvärden I” and “Hyresvärden II”. The rigid man, depicted in a black suite with a distinctive white collar as an angle, would intrigue her. The curve of the nose is enhanced by the shadow.
In 1945 Schjerfbeck turns her focus on her composition from 1926, now in the collection at Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki, called “Hyresvärden som ung” (The Landlord as a Young Man) and repeats it. The previous technique of oil on canvas is now watercolour and heightened white on paper. In the same way she reduces her images, the transparency of the paint enhances a softness in the rigid play of shadows and light. Through her stylization, that approaches abstraction, she developed an artistic innovation that was completely her own. In a period of time when she was concluding all her experiences at the age of exceeding impressing eighty years, she excels and enhances with an intensifying creativity. ■