Helene Schjerfbeck review – a strange and silent beauty

It would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for a show than the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Of all the Nordic artists exhibited here of late – from Christian Købke and Vilhelm Hammershøi to Per Kirkeby and Olafur Eliasson – Schjerfbeck is undoubtedly the least known in Britain. This is mainly to do with the fact that almost all of her work remains in Finland, where it is greatly revered, but still the oversight seems inexplicable. For this is an art of peculiar beauty.

Quiet people in silent rooms, their thoughts very nearly withheld: that was her lifelong subject. A woman with eyes downcast, contained in her private emotions and the silvery glow of Schjerfbeck’s paint. A mother with her back turned to the viewer, the infant on her shoulder looking warily at us out of the shadows. A schoolgirl with thin pigtails and outsize shoes standing upright in her long black pinafore, a picture of obedience yet also shy courage, her spirit dignified by the painting.

Schjerfbeck’s images of children must, at the very least, gather some of their powerful insight from her own experience. The child of an office manager in the Finnish railways, she broke her hip at the age of four, an accident that left her permanently lame and unable to attend school. Her relief, she wrote, came with the present of some pencils and paper – the gift of “the whole world”.

The opening gallery at the Royal Academy shows the rapid flowering of an astonishing talent – tender yet incisive portraits of friends, the painting (a national treasure in Finland) of a convalescent child fascinated by a budding sprig, above all the 1884 painting called The Door. This shows a shadowy stone room, built up from dark to silvery grey in the old master tradition. But the warm light glowing under the door turns the painting nearly abstract, a Rothko 50 years in advance.

Lameness, and the illnesses that came with it, allowed Schjerfbeck to travel only intermittently – to Paris and then England in the 1880s, where she met an artist who cruelly cited her health when he broke off their engagement. She never married, and lived in relative seclusion in Finnish villages almost for the rest of her life. There were critical successes and national awards but they alternated with deep pain and sadness. Sometimes she was only able to work for an hour or two a day; yet she left nearly 1,000 works.

This show offers only around 70 paintings but they are so judiciously selected as to give a strong sense of her singularity. It is true that her early work is conspicuously influenced by the painters she admired – El Greco, Manet, the impressionists – but she becomes purely herself in these northern interiors, with their architectonic plainness. A painting called Silence shows a woman looking downwards, the atmosphere of eerie quietude heightened by the chill blue of her blouse against a stark black backdrop.

Schjerfbeck was herself tremendously stylish. In the self-portraits she wears tailored coats, high collars and fine jewellery, resembling a concise and crop-haired Jean Muir towards the end of her life. She subscribed to Marie Claire (first published as long ago as 1937) and had her clothes shipped over from the Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

There is an intense pleasure in the way the paint lies on her canvases too – like face powder or rouge, sometimes like lipstick; with the dryness of fine pastel or the ancient appearance of fresco. She reworked her paintings with brushes, palette knives and even sandpaper to get her distinctive look, which involves amazingly subtle shifts of tone and a superb line that pins things down, hemming in floating colours and shapes, fine as dressmaker’s chalk.

There is one conspicuously fashionable portrait here. It shows a man and woman in evening dress of an almost radioactive luminescence, standing before a palm-tree oasis afloat on the ocean. Is it real or a dream? The whole scene is like a vision. Only the painting’s title – The Tapestry – tells you that the island is woven, another illusion like the painting itself.

Schjerfbeck was as interested in cloche hats as Japanese woodcuts and the art of Cézanne. Her portraits show the full range of her interests. Sometimes the analogy between paint and makeup is too close, with the face becoming caricatural in its abbreviations, or the effect borders on kitsch.

But look at the 1909 painting of her mother, Whistlerian in its arrangement of blacks and greys, showing that austere woman in profile. Her eye sidles in our direction with an acute self-consciousness that suggests both patient resignation and rising mutiny. This is crucial to Schjerfbeck’s achievement as an artist, this immense range of contradictory nuances. And it is nowhere more visible than in the self-portraits of 50 years, superbly presented here in a single gallery.

Where her other female sitters are always gazing askance, offstage, downwards, into their own inner drift, Schjerfbeck actively sights herself in the mirror. Her eyes are instantly recognisable. Large, round, watchful, undeceived – somewhere between timid and alarming in their own right.

In 1912, she looks over her shoulder, startled and shy in a painting of paradoxical force. Three years later, she is a black-and-white study against silver leaf. The same year, she appears alongside her paintbrushes in a glowing orange pot, and it is hard to tell whether the high-chrome maquillage belongs to her own face or her marvellous portrayal.

Gradually the self-portraits deepen with age. Botched, scored out, unfinished, they lose colour in favour of form. The artist is a sharp-eyed old bird, angular in grey and taupe; or a dark ghost, a stray spot of lipstick beneath her gaping mouth. She is a primitive mask, or she starts to disappear in a haze of myopia. It is one the greatest time-lapse sequences in European art.

In the final self-portrait, made at the age of 82, Schjerfbeck has reverted to drawing. The eyes are sightless, the face no more than a pictogram: it is the image of a death foretold. The artist is now no more than a line, but what a line – the perfect distillation of herself.