Il mito di Aino

Gallen-Kallela painted this Aino triptych in 1891, when Finland was a grand duchy under the Russian tsar and a generation of Finnish artists was turning its own folklore into a national art. The story comes from the Kalevala, the collected Finnish oral epic. Young Aino has been promised to the old sage Vainamoinen against her will. On one wing he surprises her in the forest, on the other she chooses the water over the marriage, and in the centre she surfaces as a fish, slipping from the old man's hands as he sits fishing. This was among the works that launched Finland's national-romantic style. Gallen-Kallela carved the surrounding frame himself and cut lines of the Kalevala straight into the wood, so the poem sits around the painting in his own hand.