Démasquée

In 1888 the young Akseli Gallen-Kallela was studying in Paris, absorbing French naturalism. He painted a Parisian model named Ismailia seated naked on a couch, and beneath her he laid a ryijy, a woven rug from Finnish folk tradition, a piece of home under a very Parisian subject. Around her he set a lily for innocence, a guitar, and, grinning in the shadows behind, a small figure of Death. A Finnish collector, H.F. Antell, had commissioned a picture and refused this one when he saw it. Viewers since have compared her steady outward gaze to the model in Manet's Olympia, painted a generation earlier. The French title, Demasquee, means unmasked.