Lot Essay
Elin Danielson-Gambogi took classes with the painter Adolf von Becker, whose school was attended by young Finnish students including Helene Schjerfbeck.
In 1883 Danielson-Gambogi received a grant to travel to Paris where she studied sculpture under Auguste Rodin. As Jane R. Becker notes, she would spend the summertime in artists’ communities in Brittany, where “the landscapes were a perpetual source of inspiration. It was here that she met the naturalist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, who inspired her to lighten her palette” (L. Madeline et al., Exhibition catalogue, Women Artists in Paris 1850-1900, New Haven, 2017, p. 247).
Writing on the lives of female artists in Paris in the 19th Century, Caroline Chapman observes of Danielson-Gambogi:
Judging by their journals and letters, the female students found ingenious ways to circumvent some of the unwritten rules governing women's behaviour... A few of the foreign students ignored the rules and enjoyed bohemian life to the full. The Finnish artist Elin Danielson-Gambogi smoked, drank wine, went to parties and had many affairs until she married. (Coming from one of the most egalitarian societies in the world, where women obtained the vote in 1906 - the first in Europe to do so - the Finnish women students felt freer to act as they pleased without incurring society's censure.) (C. Chapman, Nineteenth-Century Women Artists: Sisters of the Brush, 2021, p. 42.)
Danielson-Gambogi painted the current work in the year that she married the Italian painter Raffaello Gambogi. This large vista of a worker in a field is reminiscent of her compositions of vineyards painted in that same year, and reflective of Valkonen's observation, "Elin Danielson's style approached Impressionism but soon returned to Realism...Danielson was considered to have great promise, but her work is not known well enough for us to confirm or reject the comparison to Gallén that was made at the time" (M Valkonen, Finnish Art over the Centuries, Keuruu, 1992, p.71).