Akseli Gallen-Kallela Finnish 1865-1931

By descent from the artist to the present owner

Tampere, Taidemuseo, Akseli & Young Finland, Akseli Gallen-Kallela as a Nation-Builder, 2006, no. 45
Groninger, Groninger Museum, Akseli Gallen-Kallela 1865-1931, The Spirit of Finland, 2007, n.n. (illustrated in colour in the catalogue)

Onni Okkonen, Akseli Gallen-Kallela Taidetta, Wsoy, 1936, no. 138, illustrated
Onni Okkonen, A. Gallen-Kallela, Elämä ja taide, Wsoy, 1949, p. 666, illustrated
Aleksis Kivi, Seitsemän veljestä, Helsinki, 1984, pp. 284-5, illustrated in colour

The canvas is laid onto a board which remains flat and even. No retouchings are evident under ultraviolet light. There are a few tiny pinholes to the extreme left edge, top left and top right corners, otherwise the work is in very good original condition and the artist's original impastos remain intact. Held in a simple wooden frame painted silver.
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International interest in the work of Akseli Gallen-Kallela has been gaining ground in recent years. In 1999 the National Gallery in London purchased Keitele, one of Gallen-Kallela's most  sublime landscapes, and an iconic image of Finland. During this year and last the artist has been the subject of a major retrospective in Tampere (Akseli and Young Finland, Akseli Gallen-Kallela as a Nation Builder) and in Groninger, Holland (Akseli Gallen-Kallela: The Spirit of Finland). His work formed a key component of the major exhibition A Mirror of Nature, Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910, which toured throughout Scandinavia and to Minneapolis in 2006. In March this year the artist was the subject of a major article in Art in America by Joe Martin Hill. Lots 365-369 have been sent for sale from different national and international collections.

Painted in the summer of 1904 in the forests near lake Keitele in central Finland, the massive tree trunks and scarred and contorted surface of the bark in Burnt Forest evoke both the majesty of the Finnish landscape and the richness of the country's folklore.

In the centre of the composition a woodpecker, distinctive in its scarlet plumage, labours incessantly at a standing stump, a lone activity that for Gallen-Kallela evoked the vitality of life in the quietude of the hinterlands, a subject that he had first considered in The Great Black Woodpecker of 1892-3. Akseli Gallen-Kallela went on to develop the mask-like anthropomorphic forms that seem to emerge from the surface of the trees in Burnt Forest in the backdrop for Remorseful Kullervo of 1918.

But as well as evoking Finnish legends, the scorched and twisted bark, broken branches and charred stumps also speak of the political menace posed by Russia. In 1899 Czar Nicholas II, Grand Duke of Finland, abolished the special rights and privileges afforded to the Finnish people. Biomorphic in form and spectre-like in feel, the ravaged trees in Burnt Forest suggest the oppression and anxiety felt by Finland in the aftermath of the Czar's action, and consequent creeping Russification. As Finland's fragile political identity was increasingly challenged by the imperial ambitions of its bigger neighbour Gallen-Kallela's depiction of the woodpecker and his portrayal of the mythical heros from old Finnish sagas became poignant symbols of the country's indomitable spirit in the face of growing adversity.