Edvard Isto

In February 1899 Tsar Nicholas II issued a manifesto declaring that laws for the whole empire could be passed without the consent of Finland's own parliament. Finland was then a self-governing grand duchy inside the Russian Empire, and there the decree was taken as an attack on its constitution. That same year Edvard Isto answered with one image. In The Attack, a double-headed Russian eagle swoops on the Finnish Maiden, the woman who personifies the nation, and tries to tear away her book of laws.

Isto was a farmer's son from Alatornio, in the far north near the Swedish border, the youngest of nine children. He came to Helsinki in 1888 to study at the school of applied arts and later trained in Berlin on a state grant. A woman from Alatornio, Emma Kyöstäjä, posed for the Maiden.

The painting could not be shown openly. In the autumn of 1899 it went on view in secret at a seaside villa in Helsinki's Kaivopuisto district, and when the Russian gendarmes, the tsar's political police, found out, Isto took the canvas through Sweden to Germany. A Berlin firm printed more than 10,000 reproductions, and postcard editions followed. Isto died in Helsinki in 1905, aged 39, and the painting is now in the National Museum of Finland.