Serlachius receives as a donation Ada Thilén’s work Tvätterska

The donation was accepted by Henrik de la Chapelle, Chairman of the Board of the Fine Arts Foundation, and Laura Kuurne, Head of Collections and Exhibitions.

Tvätterska was originally acquired for the home of paper, pulp and timber industrialist R. Erik Serlachius, and was inherited by Christina Serlachius-Reenpää after her father’s death in 1980. She remembers it well from her childhood home Honkahovi, but does not know exactly how and when the work was acquired.

 “I no longer have space for the painting. It previously hang at my summer house, but for the last couple of years I have stored it at home. Here at the museum is in the right place for it,” she says.

The Ada Thilén work successfully complements the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation’s collection, which focuses on Finnish art from the late 19th/early 20th centuries. “Conservators will first examine the work to see if it needs cleaning, for example. At some point we will also display the painting, but as yet there is no specific timetable for this,” says Kuurne.

An overshadowed talent

Ada Thilén was part of a quartet of artists, whose other members were Helene Schjerfbeck, Maria Wiik and Helena Westermarck. The women studied, painted and travelled together from the 1870s to the early 1900s.Friendship and correspondence continued throughout their lives, even though the women later lived in different parts of Finland and occasionally abroad.

Unlike her more famous artist sisters, Thilén has received scant attention in Finnish art history. Her life has been little studied, even though she was a talented artist with a long career.

Thilén came from a wealthy family and did not need to support herself by selling her works. She also gifted them to friends and relatives. As a result, more works are still to be found in private homes than in public collections.

The work Tvätterska has only rarely been seen in public exhibitions. It was possibly in the Ateneum’s 1962 Realism exhibition and in the Hämeenlinna Art Museum’s 2014 Fellowship of Artists exhibition, which presented the work of the above-mentioned four artists.

From landscape painter to portraitist

As a young woman, Ada Thilén studied as a private pupil of Hjalmar Munsterhjelm, adopting from him the principles of romantic landscape painting. Later, she became a student at Adolf von Becker’s private art academy, where she received her first influences from French painting.

In the late 1870s/early 1880s, Thilén studied with Schjerfbeck and Westermarck in Paris. As a result of the influences received there, Thilén’s production in the 1880s was dominated by realism and plein-air painting.Tvätterska also dates from this period.

Thilén enjoyed painting portraits, especially of children and young women. They are considered to be the best works of her production. Landscapes nevertheless remained important subjects for the artist right up to the end of her career.

Thilén remained unmarried throughout her life, lived with her two sisters, and travelled extensively. She was visually impaired from birth and had a glass eye. This did not, however, prevent her from building a career as an artist.

She never held any solo exhibitions, but participated in numerous group exhibitions. Her production was most extensively exhibited in 1920 at Salon Strindberg, where around thirty of her works from 1876–1919 were displayed.