Pia Maria Montonen

GIRL WATERING FLOWERS
Oil on canvas, 70x45 cm.
Signed A. Lundahl at the bottom right
Undated, but probably from the early 1890s

GIRL FROM THE ARCHIPELAGO
Pastel 70x44 cm
Signed Amélie Lundahl at the bottom left
Undated

Amélie Lundahl (1850–1914) created her finest works in the last two decades of the 19th century. Her post-academic interests as a realist painter ranged from historical themes to the routines of everyday life. Lundahl matured as an artist in 1880s France, establishing her reputation, themes and colour palettes as a painter of outdoor scenes, with the solitary thoughtful woman emerging as a key theme in her art. Lundahl’s landscapes are usually illuminated by the even light of an overcast day that brings out a pearl-grey palette, speckled with old pink and mint green colours.
While in France in 1885 Lundahl created one of her best-known paintings, a relatively large (99 x 67 cm) work in oils called La Petite Jardinière (the Garden Girl) that is now in the collections of the Finnish National Gallery. Instead of the customary view in profile, the girl is shown standing en face in a greenhouse. The significance of this painting is reflected in its unusually large size for this artist and the particular situation of the model in the challenging lighting conditions of the greenhouse. The painting was created for the Spring Salon exhibition in Paris, from which it was to emerge from among thousands of rival works.
In the early 1890s Amélie Lundahl then painted a Nordic version of her French Garden Girl, which was once again a relatively large (70 x 45 cm) work in oils depicting a girl watering flowers on a windowsill. The scene is again illuminated from a point in the middle of the work, from which the light filters beautifully through the diaphanous fabric of the girl’s blouse. The gradation of colour is reminiscent of overcast daylight, with the pink and green hues employed by Lundahl in France, though the mood is brighter and the light a little stronger. The strawberry blonde subject is also captured in Lundahl’s preferred profile pose as she waters the seedlings, lost in her own thoughts. Lundahl has brought the verdure of Bretagne to the pale Nordic interior but here, too, the plants are thriving and the light streaming in from the window suggests the return of spring and summer.

The large pastel work Girl from the Archipelago is similarly an adaptation of a theme from Lundahl’s Parisian years, showing a young woman returning from the fields in the early evening carrying some bundle on her shoulder. Lundahl painted several versions of this theme in Finland, including girls carrying a rake or bundles of brushwood. In this present work a beautiful woman approaches us through an archipelago landscape in early summer carrying a green branch, perhaps in preparation for the Midsummer celebration.
After returning from France in summer 1885 Lundahl moved to Stockholm, aiming to make a living as a portrait painter. The new pastel technique accordingly suited the artist, as it was quicker and cheaper than working in oils. Lundahl became accomplished in this demanding technique over the years, with pastel paintings often emerging as the most vibrant and masterful of her later works. They vividly display the artist’s deepest aspirations, as she summarised in a personal letter: “A simple study, created naturally as the form of the model appeared to me.” (“En enkel studie efter naturen sådan den tedde sig för mig i modellens skepnad.”)

The work is said to have passed through two families after it was won by the parents-in-law of the present family as a prize in a raffle organised by the Finnish Art Society in 1903. Many of Lundahl’s paintings found their first homes in this way and have evidently been cherished, as they often remained in the same family almost to this day, meaning for more than a century.