Nella sauna

Gallen-Kallela was in his early twenties, splitting his life between the art schools of Paris and the Finnish countryside, when he painted this in a rented croft at Keuruu in 1889. What he brought home from France was a plain naturalism, painting people exactly as the light finds them, and he aimed it at a subject no Paris teacher would have set: a woman washing in a smoky, wood-fired sauna. The only light is the low red glow of the stove, catching her skin and losing everything else in dusk. He was not happy with it. He thought the picture unfinished and rough, and let it go. A friend's brother eventually gave it to the Ateneum in Helsinki in 1922, long after Gallen-Kallela had made his name on something else entirely, his paintings of Finland's national epic.