To see an exhibition of an artist’s work without seeing a copy or reading something about it is rare. And to encounter paintings—professionally installed in a major museum—and find the work powerful, intelligent, even sublime, is like an explorer arriving in an uncharted territory. The experience is rare, you wish you could see the art for the first time, without images or ideas clouding your vision. That was the feeling when I walked into the exhibit, “Seeing Peace: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck,” at the Met. He has never been exhibited in the US and has been exhibited in Sweden and his native Finland. The work is amazing, it needs to be absorbed slowly and quietly all good art should.
The paintings are installed in chronological order, allowing viewers to follow the artist’s evolution—an important lens for understanding a life’s work. From his first self-portrait, painted at the age of 22, to his last at the age of 83, a year before his death, Schjerfbeck’s development is amazing to behold. It took place against a background of repeated illness, civil war, two world wars, and persistent insecurity. He lived to paint.
Born in 1862 in Helsinki, Finland, his talent was immediately apparent. He was admitted to the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Society at the age of 11. By the time he was 15, he had advanced to a private school, and by the time he was 17, he had earned a tour fee for his painting. Wounded Warrior in the Snow. While in Paris, he visited museums and studied the masters, carrying his sketchbook everywhere. Back in Helsinki, he painted Fête Juivehe sent it to the Paris Salon, and it was accepted. He was 21 years old. That marked the beginning of a lifelong habit: he produced 40 self-portraits during his lifetime.
Schjerfbeck never married and never had children—all he wanted to do was paint. He kept trying materials, pushing himself to the brink of exhaustion. He mixed charcoal, watercolor, gouache and tempera with oil. He scratched the surface with a stylus, the underlying layers exposed, and used sandpaper and rubbed cloth on the canvas to reveal its raw texture. Visiting a fellow painter in Cornwall, he painted “the sea, blue and bright, the sky blue, and the light so soft that you cannot see the horizon.”
At the age of 30, he started teaching, demanding complete silence in the classroom and not liking questions. Shy and hesitant, he found teaching to be difficult and limited his practice. He spent the summer in rehab—he was diagnosed with neurasthenia, a nervous breakdown that causes fatigue and headaches. One wonders if, having been relieved of the burden of teaching, he might have suffered less. At the age of 40, she finally resigned and moved to a small town in Finland to take care of her mother for 15 years. Her mother used to model. Schjerfbeck preferred quiet interiors—his paintings express function, subject and feeling. He said, “there’s no need to list all the details, it’s just an indication that we’re getting closer to the truth … we’re letting the work unfold.” It was at this time that his popularity grew, and the salesman got his job. However, he remained prone to depression, plagued by doubts and dissatisfied with what he had done.
His salesman brought him magazines featuring contemporary artists, and he was very fond of El Greco. “I would like to take El Greco’s palette: white ochre, black, yellow and cinnabar.” He studied with Modigliani, which can be seen in the eyes of his portraits—each portrait facing the other, the other outside and inside. He was always looking at the outside world while holding on to his own inside. These portraits—mostly 20 created in his last two years—reveal both his dedication and his struggle. He presented himself carelessly, suffering from stomach cancer and decay. These last self-portraits, hanging on one curved wall in the Met, are haunting, haunting and profoundly dignified. They show an aging face, drooping eyes, pursed lips and thinning hair. They are worked extensively, usually in oil, air and charcoal, scrubbed and sanded down to the grain of the canvas. They feel foreign, like the Scandinavian light of the Northern sky.
At the age of 82, very ill, he was stopped by his salesman at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Although he missed Finland, he continued to paint until his death two years later. His easel and paints sat beside his bed. “Painting is difficult, and exhausts the body and soul when it doesn’t turn out well—and yet, it’s my only joy in life.” The Met’s exhibition is astonishing—a range of subjects and techniques, a daring exploration. The silence in his work is soft, gentle and intense at the same time. In a world full of men, despite isolation, illness and doubt, she made her place. Seeing this show was a revelation—even more so because it had never been shown in the US before. Lace Shawl it was the first of his paintings to enter a US museum collection, acquired by the Met in 2023. His voice—fluctuating, shifting and completely singular—is one of the ages. We are lucky that he finally came.
“Seeing Peace: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck” is on view through April 5, 2026, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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