Daughter of the Medicis

Einar Reuter (1881-1968) wrote two biographies on Helene Schjerfbeck in the 1950s under the pseudonym H. Ahtela. Reuter, a state forester, as well as a writer and artist, first visited Schjerfbeck in Hyvinkää in 1915. 'A knock on the door, and in walks a man in his thirties perhaps. He is behaving very unpretentiously, Helene notes. He tells her he bought two of her paintings two years before at Stenman's exhibition, The Woodcutter and Sisters, and that he, in addition to that, owned a couple more works by her and now wanted to meet their creator...This day she remembers forever. Hours passed. They only talked about art, about Gauguin in private galleries in Paris, The Hague and Moscow, about modern painters...They had coffee with Helene's mother.' Reuter's relationship with the artist grew and in 1917 he and Gösta Stenman organised Schjerfbeck's first solo exhibition at Stenman's gallery in Helsinki, in which the present work was exhibited. Reuter and Schjerfbeck became life-long friends and, as an ardent admirer of her work, Reuter was able to acquire some of her most important pictures.

Schjerfbeck's art employs diverse stylistic influences at different times in her life, but always remains characteristically individual. At the same time, she reminds of many and of noone. Both Reuter and Gotthard Johansson point out the enormous influence Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec had on Schjerfbeck in the period from 1905-7. Schjerfbeck herself even emphasises the importance of the line to her women artist friends, stating how it carries her work to such an extent. Johansson comments about the present work, 'The small, mischievously severe girl's profile, Daughter of the Medicis, is painted in watercolour on tinted paper, almost brown on brown, a technique which she also often used later...reminding through its graphic effect of Toulouse-Lautrec's most exquisite posters' (G. Johansson, Helene Schjerfbecks Konst, Stockholm 1940, pp. 31-2).