This had been the driving force throughout her entire life, and thanks to her meeting with the Finnish-Swedish art dealer Gösta Stenman, she was also able to focus on her artistic practice, while he helped her make a living from it. What he also contributed was the dissemination and promotion of her art, so that even today she must be regarded as one of our foremost Nordic artists. She is considered one of Finland’s most significant modernists, having developed a completely distinctive modern expression by gradually stripping away everything superfluous in her paintings. Very recently she was once again brought into the spotlight and celebrated in a major exhibition at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

When Gösta Stenman first discovered Schjerfbeck in the 1910s, she was relatively unknown, living in isolation and long outside the public art scene. Stenman saw in her a unique artist with exceptional modernist potential and quickly became her most important agent. The relationship between Helene Schjerfbeck and the art dealer Gösta Stenman is one of the most significant artist–dealer collaborations in Nordic art history – professional, complex, and deeply marked by mutual dependence. Stenman took active responsibility for her livelihood by purchasing and commissioning works, arranging exhibitions in Helsinki, Stockholm and internationally, and introducing her to a new audience of collectors. It was also he who persuaded her to begin working in graphic media. Over time he became her principal financial support, and their collaboration developed into an almost exclusive working relationship that came to shape the final stage of Schjerfbeck’s long career.