Hugo Simberg

In 1903 a young Finnish painter finished a picture that his country would eventually vote its national favourite. Hugo Simberg's The Wounded Angel shows two solemn boys in dark clothes carrying a stretcher along a bleak shoreline, and on it sits a winged girl in white, blindfolded and bandaged, a small angel gathered up like an injured bird.

Simberg refused to explain it, telling viewers to draw their own meaning. He worked in the Symbolist current of the late 1800s, drawn to death, folk belief and quiet melancholy, and he gave death a strange gentleness. In one of his paintings grinning skeletons tenderly water a garden of flowers.

He painted a version of the wounded angel again as a fresco inside the cathedral at Tampere. Simberg died young, in 1917, months before Finland declared the independence he did not live to see.