‘Albert Edelfelt assumed a place at the right hand of [Adolf] Neovius in Paraske’s personal pantheon. She affectionately compressed his names together into ‘Albertfelt’, and as he painted, she observed him as intently as he observed her. From t.mes to t.mes they would interrupt their concentration to be served coffee in gold-rimmed cups. Later Paraske’s reminiscences of the rich dark coffee, the delicate coffee cups, and Albertfelt’s beautiful hands would irritate the people of Sakkola who had never had the chance to know such things.’
Painted in 1893.
In the 1890s Albert Edelfelt made three oil paintings and a watercolour of Karelian oral poet Larin Paraske (1833-1904). In all these paintings she is depicted as the humble peasant woman she was, wearing the traditional harakka head piece. Gifted with a phenomenal memory (she is often referred to as the Finnish Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory), Paraske could recite off by heart over 32,000 verses of poetry in the so-called rhythmical Kalevala metre, passed down verbally through two millennia.
In 1891, the clergyman Adolph Neovius of Porvoo, who was documenting national folk poetry, transcribed her songs, an opus of 1,583 texts in all. During her stay with Neovius Larin was invited to Helsinki to perform at the Finnish Literature Society, which brought her to the public's attention for the first t.mes . Eero Järnefelt, living in Kaivopuisto in Helsinki, invited her to model for a painting. Albert Edelfelt, also living nearby, learnt of her presence and in 1893 invited her to model for him too. While Järnefelt painted her singing in a trance embracing a large wooden cross, Edelfelt bestowed her with a kantele (even though she couldn’t play it), a traditional Finnish and Karelian plucked string instrument, to illustrate that she was performing a song.
From the 1890s Edelfelt developed an increasing fascination for performing artists and the auras that surrounded them. In 1890, while working on a portrait of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, he wrote in a letter to his mother that painting is the art of depicting, by visible means, what you cannot.mes rely see with your eyes. By this he meant capturing the essence of the performing artist’s gaze and, through the artful use of light, the energy they radiate. In the case of the present work, Larin Paraske’s concentrated expression, and the hands and fingers of a hardworking peasant brought into sharp focus, tell us of her character and her harsh life.
Marina Catani posits that Edelfelt painted this portrait in the studio basement of his home in Kaivopuisto, a space he also used to paint his Washerwomen that same year. Here, he recreates the setting of the simple wooden hut Larin would have called home in Ingria on the Karelian Isthmus (now Russia). She was an ethnic Izhorian, was an Orthodox by religion, had nine children, and lived in poverty until her last years when she was granted a pension by the Finnish Literature Society.
This version of Larin Paraske has been widely exhibited, and was, most recently, on long term loan to the Ateneum. A second version of the present composition, now in Odessa Museum of Western & Oriental Art, was sold by the artist to a collects or in Russia. The third painting by Edelfelt of Larin Paraske, now in the Hämeenlinna Art Museum is painted en plein air and shows her sitting on a verdant hill.
We are grateful to Marina Catani for her assistance in cataloguing this work.