"The Thinker" has often been interpreted as representing Väinämöinen of the profound thoughts.
In a letter to Eliel Aspelin from Paris and dated 27.12.1898, Emil Wikström himself gives a different account of the sculpture's history: “Completed last week as a side job, a certain contemplative old man with a cloak around his shoulders and resting his elbow on a table, his thumb on one cheek, the forefinger on the other. About half life size.”
The model was a bearded Frenchman whose looks matched Wikström's conception of what characters in his Finnish national creations should look like.

In the same letter he wrote that he had sold a plaster cast of the sculpture to the Finnish opera singer Aino Ackté, who intended to give it to her dentist as a gift.

“The first work in my whole life that is going to stay in France, and for money.”

Wikström made a bronze cast of the sculpture himself, but the one now up for auction he dedicated to architect Birger Federley in 1913. Only one other was made, which today belongs to the collection of the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation.
Both sculptures were cast by J. Petermann in Brussels in 1911.