Ateneum

When the Ateneum opened in 1887, Finland was still a grand duchy under the Russian tsar, and an art of its own was only beginning to take shape. The palatial building on Helsinki's central square, designed by Theodor Höijer, gathered an art school and a growing collection under one roof, and over the next decades it filled with the painters now remembered as Finland's golden age.

The pictures people come for draw on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted its heroes and its doomed maiden Aino in a stark, hard-edged style that helped a country picture itself. Nearby hang Helene Schjerfbeck's pared-down portraits and Hugo Simberg's strange "Wounded Angel," two boys carrying a bandaged figure on a stretcher. There is foreign art too, including a street scene in Auvers by van Gogh, bought in 1903, among the first works by him any museum acquired.