La Mère de Lemminkäinen

Gallen-Kallela lost his young daughter Marjatta to diphtheria in 1895, and his work turned darker and fiercer after it. Two years later he painted this scene from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic stitched together from old oral songs earlier that century. The hero Lemminkäinen has been killed, his body torn apart and thrown into the black river of the dead. His mother has raked the pieces from the water and sewn them back together, and now she kneels over him, waiting for a bee she has sent to fetch honey from the gods to wake him. He switched from oil to a matte tempera for the hard, otherworldly light. Finland was still a grand duchy under the Russian tsar, and pictures drawn from its own myths carried a real charge in those years.