Markku Valkonen : The golden age : Finnish art 1850-1907

THE GOLDEN AGE tells the story of some forty Finnish painters and sculptors, a fifth of them women, against the unfolding backdrop of life in the Grand Duchy of Finland, a land struggling to find its national identity and independence. At time during this struggle, Finland was perhaps even better known in Europe than today.

In a series of pithy essays, the author and art critic Markku Valkonen, writes about the influences in the lives of artists working between the middle of the last century and the early years of this. Of their extensive travels in Europe, pilgrimages to classical Rome, studies in Düsseldorf, Berlin and Paris, summers in St. Malo, St. Ives and the Riviera, but above all about their return home, to the land of dense forests and unending lakes, which in their hearts they had never left. With them they brought new ideas about art, not always acceptable to their fellow countrymen or even to themselves, but adapted into something that is immediately recognisable as uniquely Nordic.