Schjerfbeck came of age when Finland was experiencing a surge in national identity. In the latter decades of the 19th century, the country had become an autonomous grand duchy of the Russian Empire following 500 years of Swedish domination, and Finland’s government was determined to bring the nation into the mainstream of European culture. Identified early for her talent, Schjerfbeck belonged to a generation of Finnish painters—many of them women—sent abroad by the government to train in Paris. She was also commissioned to copy great works in Russia and Italy.

Helene Schjerfbeck. Self-Portrait, Light and Shadow (1945).  Photo: Matias Uusikylä/Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation

Her personality didn’t lend itself to a cosmopolitan life in Helsinki, but she was a central figure in what is called the golden age of Finnish art, from 1880 to 1910. Unlike other Nordic modernists, Schjerfbeck developed her own idiosyncratic and introspective style without engaging with German expressionism, as Norway’s Edvard Munch did. More to the point, she seems to exemplify the very Finnish concept of sisu, or determination in the face of adversity.

Schjerfbeck faced plenty of it. At the age of 4, a fall left her with a lifelong limp. An English artist who asked her to marry him reneged after learning that her father had died of tuberculosis, then thought to be hereditary. (She never married after that.) She was plagued by “neurasthenia,” or depression, and found that teaching left her exhausted. Then, beginning in 1897, she became her mother’s caretaker, and in 1902 moved to a town 30 miles from Helsinki with a milder climate and a sanatorium. She remained there for the better part of 25 years, not really isolated from the world of painters and the modernism exploding across Europe, but also not actively engaged in it. And yet, she was still able to create a distinctive and very personal form of modernism that resonated within the Nordic countries, and which still remains relevant to us here in New York today.

The show at the Met is presented in roughly three sections. It begins with Schjerfbeck’s emergence as an artist painting Romantic themes from Finland’s history, and learning from the French realist painters Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme. You can see a whiff of Gérôme’s orientalism in Fête Juive; Sukkot; Feast of Tabernacles, a painting she made in the summer of 1883 to submit to the Paris Salon. Jules Bastien-Lepage was also an influence on her work, as you can detect in Clothes Drying, from 1883, which is also in the show. (Go upstairs to view Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc, from 1879, to see what I mean.) Even though she was working in the realist vein, the paintings already show a defiance of convention: Clothes Drying was criticized for ignoring the elements of a standard landscape, and works she painted on a trip to Italy, along with a beautiful depiction of a manor house in Finland, show that she was already beginning to form her own ideas.

The second part of the show tracks her evolution in the years she was ostensibly isolated and caring for her mother. It’s here we see the beginning of Schjerfbeck’s interest in flattening her canvases and abrading the surface. The works after 1902 shown here display the influence of artists including James McNeill Whistler, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and, later still, El Greco, with Schjerfbeck painting mostly lone figures. More than that, they are strikingly cosmopolitan for an artist in remote Finland.