“Rustic Life”
“Rustic Life” is an oil on canvas painting by the Finnish Symbolist and Romantic artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, from 1887. Gallen-Kallela was seen as the preeminent Finnish artist of his time. Through his art, he helped to give the Finnish people their own national identity.
Gallen-Kallela painted this piece when he was just 23 years old. It was first exhibited in 1888 at the Paris Salon. Though it received good reviews, it did not sell at the exhibition.
For many years, this painting was displayed in the living room of Gallen-Kallela’s parents-in-law. In 1907, he displayed it at one of his sales exhibitions. He listed it with a much higher price because his in-laws really liked the painting and did not want him to sell it. However, it was sold to the son of a wealthy Swiss banker as a gift for his wife.
“Rustic Life” is based on a series of sketches that Gallen-Kallela made while he was staying in a crofter’s holding, named Ekola, in Keuruu on Lake Jamajärvi in central Finland. He was greatly inspired by the daily lives of the people that lived here during the harsh winters.
In this piece, Gallen-Kallela shows the viewer how the hearth is the focal point of life during wintertime and how everyday tasks took place around it. His models were local people. They include a well-known and respected bear hunter who is the man in the foreground. Gallen-Kallela’s tracker and guide is the man smoking the pipe. The crofter’s daughter, whose house he was staying at, is the girl in the back right. And then there’s the cat on the stove. Cats would often nap on the stoves in Finland in the winter, and I had first learned of it while reading the Finnish epic, The Kalevala.
The discs strung up across the ceiling are Reikäleipä, the traditional Finnish crispbread. All of the Nordic countries have their own variety. The crispbread is a round flat bread that is dry, almost like a cracker, which the Finnish people cured by hanging along the ceiling. They can store for a long period of time and are a great help during the long winters.
“Rustic Life” is currently on display at the Serlachius Museum Gösta in the collections of the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation in Mänttä-Vilppula, Finland.
For more on Akseli Gallen-Kallela, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
