Kullervo Cursing

In February 1899, Tsar Nicholas II issued a manifesto that stripped away much of Finland's self-rule, and a country still part of the Russian empire turned hard toward its own myths. Gallen-Kallela had been mining the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, for years, and this figure is Kullervo, an orphan sold into servitude who raises his fist against the sky and swears revenge. He stands alone in a bleak northern landscape, his cattle behind him, a horn at his side. For Finns reading the news that year, a wronged man cursing a power greater than himself was no distant legend. Gallen-Kallela painted it the same year the manifesto reached Helsinki.