Konrad Mägi

Konrad Mägi painted for only about sixteen years, yet he is counted as the first great modern painter of Estonia. He came to art late and largely taught himself, moving through Saint Petersburg, Paris and a spell on the Åland islands before the light of his own northern country settled him on his subject.

His breakthrough came on the Baltic islands of Saaremaa and Vilsandi, where he spent summers painting wild shorelines and open sea in strong, almost unnatural colour. He took what he wanted from the flat bright palette of Fauvism and from German Expressionism, then tuned it to a northern stillness, and later carried the same intensity back from Italy, painting Capri and Rome from memory through the dark Estonian autumn.

When Estonia won its independence after the First World War, Mägi helped found the Pallas art school in the university town of Tartu and taught a first native generation of painters. Illness overtook him quickly. He came home in the spring of 1925 already gravely ill, was taken to a clinic in Tartu, and died that August, having left behind roughly 400 canvases.