Albert Edelfelt

Collection of the Marquis Emile de Chambure (1838-1921);

By descent;

Private collection, France. 

Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, Exposition internationale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1886;

Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1889.

B. Hintze, Albert Edelfelt, Helsinki 1949, p. 555, no. 347.

We are grateful to Mrs Marina Catani who confirmed the authentication of this work, based on photographs.

Along with Axeli Gallen-Kallelà and Helen Schjerfbeck, Albert Edelfelt was one of the three most important Finnish painters of the late nineteenth century, the golden age for pictorial art in the country, which was then still under Russian rule.

Born into an aristocratic Swedish-speaking family, Edelfelt briefly attended the University of Helsinki before beginning his artistic training at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp, which he soon left in order to settle in Paris in 1874. Turning away from history painting and influenced by his friends, the French artists Dagnan-Bouveret and Bastien-Lepage, he moved towards a naturalism that led him to depict scenes of everyday life, both in Paris and during his frequent return visits to his homeland, where his radical new art soon established him as one of the major painters of the new generation.

He began work on the Portrait of Madame de Saussine in Paris in late June/ early July 1885 and finished it.

The creation of the painted portrait was preceded by a detailed preparatory drawing, focusing on the old woman’s features, which is now in the Ateneum in Helsinki (inv. A II 1321; ill. 1). An examination of the original canvas, which is in perfect condition, reveals that Edelfelt decided to change the format while he was working on the painting. Having begun with a squarer format, which he may have felt constricted his model within an overly tight composition, the artist added a band of canvas about 14 cm wide on the left side, so as to fully represent the winter garden in which Madame de Saussine is peacefully seated.

1885, the year he painted this fine portrait, was a crucial year for Edelfelt in France: it was then that he achieved public recognition thanks to the huge success of his Portrait of Pasteur, which dated to this period. It remains to this day by far the most famous image of the French scientist (Paris, Musée d’Orsay, inv. DO 1986 16; ill. 2).