In 1880s Paris, naturalism and genre paintings were the preferred styles in the Salons where Schjerfbeck exhibited. The visitor to the Met sees how the artist, who was proficient in the vernacular of the time, went on to develop her own more abstract and interpretive style. Even when the subjects aren’t facing the viewer, as in The Seamstress (The Working Woman) (1905), Schjerfbeck’s scenes manage to feel at once spare and expressive, the composition and layers of color speaking as loudly as the subject.
Finns are stereotypically reticent, and Schjerfbeck seems to honor that characterization—partly in the service of allowing her viewer a say. “Let us avoid executing so precisely and exactly that our work closes the way instead of opening it,” she wrote to a friend. “Let us imply.”
Schjerfbeck lived a fairly reclusive life at the time. Returning to Finland in the 1890s, she lived in Helsinki before ill health and the needs of her elderly mother led her to take up residence in the small, rural town of Hyvinkää. Then, in 1923, she moved to the seaside town of Tammisaari.
Despite her geographical seclusion, the 20th century didn’t pass Schjerfbeck by. An avid student of art history, she made a series of paintings after El Greco—the Greek artist who often painted scenes of religious suffering—working from black-and-white reproductions. Schjerfbeck’s take on religious subjects had a lighter hand, exemplified by the resplendent Fragment (1904), painted after a trip to Italy to study Renaissance art. The subject is enhaloed with gold that remains luminous despite being worked over and scraped away. This painting, one of the most vulnerable in the exhibition, had special significance to the artist, who tried to locate it and buy it back after selling it.