Karl Pärsimägi

Karl Pärsimägi came from a farm in the village of Oe, in Võru County in southern Estonia, and rural life stayed among his subjects. Farmhouse with a Stove, painted in 1935 and now in the Tartu Art Museum, is one of those pictures, done in the bold Fauvist colour that earned him the nickname "the Estonian Matisse".

The son of a well-off farmer, he fought in the Estonian War of Independence in 1919 and then, against his father's wishes, enrolled at Pallas, the art school in Tartu that brought modern painting to Estonia. The landscape painter Konrad Mägi was among his teachers. In 1937 his father, finally reconciled, paid for him to move to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Colarossi.

After the Second World War broke out he stayed in Paris and did not return to Estonia, which the Soviet Union occupied in 1940. The Gestapo arrested him in Paris for reasons that remain unclear, since he was not Jewish, and sent him through the Drancy camp to Auschwitz, where he died in July 1942. Soviet authorities denied his work official recognition, and interest in it returned after Estonian independence in 1991.