The story
In 1899, months after Tsar Nicholas II's February Manifesto curtailed Finland's self-government, the painter Eetu Isto showed a young woman, the Maid of Finland, clutching a book of laws while the two-headed Russian eagle tries to tear it from her. The Attack was reproduced by the thousands in Finland, Germany and Sweden despite efforts to suppress it. The original belongs to the National Museum of Finland and is shown in its galleries on the story of Finland.
The museum building grew out of the same national mood. Three young architects, Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen, won the competition in 1902, and the granite building with its tall tower, built mainly between 1905 and 1910, opened in 1916. It is primarily a museum of Finnish history and culture, from prehistory to the present, and its paintings are here for the history they carry.
Look up in the entrance hall, which is free to enter. Its ceiling carries frescoes by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the painter of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic. He painted them in 1928, after designs he had first made for the Finnish pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1900.
