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Lot Essay
Red Roses in a glass Bowl was painted in 1944 in Saltsjobaden outside Stockholm.
Isolated from war-stricken Finland, Schjerfbeck reflected much on her art and her roots. Her art dealer Stenman and his family paid weekly visits to her in the Saltsjobaden spa hotel where her stay was paid for by Stenman. Stenman exercised a great influence on her choice of subjects both commissioning reinterpretations of old favourites - Red Roses in a glass Bowl evokes Yellow Roses in a Glass from 1888 - and urging Schjerfbeck to continue her striking series of self-portraits.
"Her debt to him [Stenman] was the most powerful driving force for her painting during her last years in Sweden, and posterity has this to thank for the late series of self-portraits" (B. Arell, Helen Schjerfbeck and her art dealer Gösta Stenman, in the catalogue of the exhibition Helen Schjerfbeck at the Finnish national gallery Ateneum, 1992, p. 101).
In 1944 Schjerfbeck painted one of her finest still lifes, Still life with blackening Apples. The rotten apples perhaps symbolise the bruised and battered Europe after four years of world conflict which she felt affected even the simple things in life. Schjerfbeck reflected in a letter to her niece in Finland that "... however comfortable I am in Sweden, I am longing for my home country and suffering with it, though it doesn't seem to care for my art very much ...".
The black shape in Red Roses in a glass Bowl may reflect the dark shadow of the second world war as it does in her Still life with blackening Apples.
It was Schjerfbeck's main concern in her final years to produce the ultimate painting where there is not a line too many and where the colour retains the very sensation of fugitive beauty. Everything superfluous is left out.
Isolated from war-stricken Finland, Schjerfbeck reflected much on her art and her roots. Her art dealer Stenman and his family paid weekly visits to her in the Saltsjobaden spa hotel where her stay was paid for by Stenman. Stenman exercised a great influence on her choice of subjects both commissioning reinterpretations of old favourites - Red Roses in a glass Bowl evokes Yellow Roses in a Glass from 1888 - and urging Schjerfbeck to continue her striking series of self-portraits.
"Her debt to him [Stenman] was the most powerful driving force for her painting during her last years in Sweden, and posterity has this to thank for the late series of self-portraits" (B. Arell, Helen Schjerfbeck and her art dealer Gösta Stenman, in the catalogue of the exhibition Helen Schjerfbeck at the Finnish national gallery Ateneum, 1992, p. 101).
In 1944 Schjerfbeck painted one of her finest still lifes, Still life with blackening Apples. The rotten apples perhaps symbolise the bruised and battered Europe after four years of world conflict which she felt affected even the simple things in life. Schjerfbeck reflected in a letter to her niece in Finland that "... however comfortable I am in Sweden, I am longing for my home country and suffering with it, though it doesn't seem to care for my art very much ...".
The black shape in Red Roses in a glass Bowl may reflect the dark shadow of the second world war as it does in her Still life with blackening Apples.
It was Schjerfbeck's main concern in her final years to produce the ultimate painting where there is not a line too many and where the colour retains the very sensation of fugitive beauty. Everything superfluous is left out.