On Foot – Artist Profiles

Adamson-Eric (1902–1968)

The Estonian artist Adamson-Eric (born Erich Carl Hugo Adamson) initially studied applied arts in Berlin, and his early engagement with arts and crafts left a lasting imprint on his later work. He subsequently studied fine art in Paris, where the diverse movements of early twentieth-century modernism also informed his artistic vision. He maintained close ties with Finland after holding a solo exhibition at the Strindberg Gallery in Helsinki in 1936.

Emphasising colour and form, Composition (1924) is an abstract watercolour that evokes a figure moving through an imagined urban landscape. The work bears a resemblance to Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the celebrated painting by the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). In both works, movement is a defining feature, recalling the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), examples of which are also on display in the exhibition.

Francis Alÿs (b. 1959)

Originally trained as an architect, the Belgian-born contemporary artist Francis Alÿs is arguably best known for his performance art, although his practice spans a wide range of media, from painting to moving-image installations. Walking plays a prominent role in many of his works. Alÿs has lived and worked in Mexico since the late 1980s, and his video Cuentos patrióticos (1997) is set in Mexico City. It shows a man leading a sheep in a circle around the flagpole in the centre of Zócalo Square. Each time the church bell tolls, another sheep joins the procession.

The work alludes to the events of 1968, when officials were summoned to the square to welcome the new government. There they began bleating in protest against arbitrary coercive measures, turning an apparent act of submission into an expression of dissent. A similar, wryly humorous quality characterises Alÿs’s video, particularly for viewers who take the time to count the sheep as they join the procession. The work can also be read as a broader commentary on herd mentality and group dynamics.

Niran Baibulat (b. 1960)

A member of Finland’s Tatar minority, Niran Baibulat is a visual artist who incorporates elements of everyday life into her installations and environmental artworks. Also known for her textile art, her practice revolves around what she describes as “otherwise walking”, a concept exemplified by her walking-based installation Permission to Cross the Street.

In this project, her route through the city was determined by an arbitrary external rule: whenever she encountered a parked red car, she would cross the street. Her movements were thus unplanned, yet not entirely random, as they were guided by a specific visual cue: vehicles of a particular colour. Baibulat photographed the cars that shaped her route and subsequently transformed the images into a sculptural installation. Through her work, she explores how walking heightens our awareness of our surroundings and fosters a more communicative and egalitarian engagement with urban space.

Elina Brotherus (b. 1972)

Elina Brotherus is one of Finland’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary artists. She frequently appears in her own photographs and videos, which engage with the tradition of self-portraiture. She often adopts an intertextual approach, entering into dialogue with other artists and with art history. Nu montant un escalator (Nude Ascending an Escalator, 2017) directly references Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) renowned Cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912).

In Brotherus’s video, the nude woman asserts herself as an active agent rather than a passive object of the gaze. Both works also evoke nineteenth-century studies of human movement, notably those by the French anatomist Paul Richer (1849–1937) and the photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), whose research explored the mechanics of actions such as ascending stairs. Examples of their research are on display in the exhibition.

Marcus Collin (1882–1966)

Marcus Collin’s art is typically associated with the heavy palette and sombre expressionism of the Finnish November Group. His work is widely recognised for its depictions of human figures engaged in hard labour or at the mercy of harsh environmental conditions. Less attention, however, has been paid to his early works inspired by his time in Paris, which are distinguished by their exuberant use of colour.

Walking is a visual motif that recurs throughout Collin’s oeuvre, from his earliest works onwards. His figures are shown trudging into headwinds or strolling along park boulevards, their postures and demeanours reflecting their age and social class. Examples include Street Scene (1904), Factory Girls (1914), and Spring on the Esplanade (1927). Alongside his artistic career, Collin played a significant role as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation. From 1935 to 1966, he held this elected position as the joint representative of the Artists’ Association of Finland and the Association of Finnish Sculptors.

Helge Dahlman (1924–1979)

Initially a member of the October Group of expressionists, Helge Dahlman gradually embraced a broader range of stylistic influences, incorporating elements of lyrical realism and Post-Impressionism, particularly Pointillist techniques. His finest landscapes capture the immediacy characteristic of plein air painting. One such work is Street Scene (1964), painted in the same year that Dahlman was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal. In this atmospheric scene, the landscape is only faintly delineated against an almost monochromatic background, while the colourful umbrellas carried by passers-by add vivid splashes of colour.

Albert Edelfelt (1854–1905)

One of Finland’s best-known artists, Albert Edelfelt began his career as a history painter. Historical subjects became less prominent in his oeuvre after he turned to French plein air painting and received an increasing number of portrait commissions. Towards the end of his career, however, he returned to depicting historical events and notable figures from bygone eras. In response to the oppressive policies imposed by Tsarist Russia, Edelfelt revisited historical subject matter around the turn of the century. Among the works he produced was the large-scale gouache The March of the Björneborg Regiment (1892), depicting a scene from J. L. Runeberg’s epic poem The Tales of Ensign Stål.

Edelfelt had also been working for some time on a seventeenth-century scene for a mural in the assembly hall of the University of Helsinki: Count Per Brahe the Younger at the Inauguration of the Royal Academy of Åbo in 1640. Completed in 1905, the mural was destroyed during the Soviet bombing of Helsinki on February 26, 1944. In the preparatory sketch held by the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation, the artist himself appears among the figures in the procession, dressed in seventeenth-century attire.

Magnus Enckell (1870–1925)

Magnus Enckell began his career as a sombre Symbolist, but after the turn of the century, he abandoned his initially subdued palette in favour of a more vibrant, Post-Impressionist style. Resurrection, Copy of the Right Half of the Altarpiece in Tampere Cathedral (1907) exemplifies his early Symbolist style. Sketches and preparatory works by Enckell and Hugo Simberg for the murals of Tampere Cathedral, then known as St John’s Church, were exhibited at the House of Nobility in Helsinki in 1907. 

View of Porvoo (1899), by contrast, is less representative of Enckell’s characteristic style. Based on a sketch by Albert Edelfelt (1854–1905), this townscape was painted on commission for the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. The painting depicts figures making their way towards the town, their journey seemingly symbolising a transition from nature to culture and civilisation, yet they appear dwarfed by Porvoo’s old wooden houses and medieval stone church.

Erik Enroth (1917–1975)

International influences abound in the work of Erik Enroth, one of Finland’s leading post-war modernists. Through his studies with the French artist André Lhote (1885–1962), Enroth adopted the angular visual language of Cubism, while his bold, vibrant palette drew on the legacies of Fauvism and Expressionism. German art of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) exerted a powerful influence on his choice of subject matter, as seen in works such as Faces in the Street, Street (both 1950–1953), and Blind (1953). Enroth portrays the post-war urban environment as a bleak stage on which psychologically scarred figures struggle to cope with their harsh circumstances.

Antti Favén (1882–1948)

Antti Favén’s portraits were so highly regarded that he came to be known as Finland’s “national portraitist”. His oeuvre, however, extends well beyond portraiture, encompassing both landscapes and genre scenes.The Student House Square (1914) depicts the site now occupied by The Three Smiths statue and the Stockmann department store.

Favén’s years of living and studying in Paris, from 1902 to 1913, are reflected in the painting’s Post-Impressionist palette and lively, spontaneous brushwork, which lend the scene a vivid sense of immediacy. With just a few suggestive brushstrokes, Favén conveys the upright and stooped postures of passers-by, as well as the slightly swaying gait of a labourer carrying a load. A dog and a horse weave through the crowd, their movements captured with equal economy.

Gustaf Wilhelm Finnberg (1784–1833)

Born in Parainen, Gustaf Wilhelm Finnberg studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and divided his career between Finland and Sweden. Among his few surviving oil paintings is a view of Arsenalsgatan in Stockholm, now held in the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation Collection. The undated work depicts the original Dramatiska theatre, which was destroyed by fire in 1825, establishing that year as the latest possible date of its completion.

The scene also shows Kungsträdgården (the Royal Garden), then enclosed by a wall, and a glimpse of St James’s Church on the left. The figures strolling along the street bring the scene to life, although they remain indistinct against the broader urban backdrop. Finnberg worked as both a landscapist and portrait painter, but his life was marked by hardship. Much of his oeuvre was destroyed in the Great Fire of Turku in 1827. After returning to Stockholm, he spent the remainder of his life in poverty.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela was one of Finland’s most celebrated painters and the favourite artist and personal friend of the patron and industrialist Gösta Serlachius (1876–1942). Early in his career, when he was still known as Axel Gallén, he began receiving financial support from Gösta’s uncle, Gustaf Adolf Serlachius (1830–1901), founder of a groundwood mill in Mänttä. The Serlachius family commissioned several works from him, and he was also much sought after by other affluent clients. His first major portrait commission came in 1885 from the Swedish engineer Johan Lennart Sebenius, manager of the Dalsbruk ironworks. Gallen-Kallela also painted a portrait of the family’s governess, Miss Thysell. As she strolls through the wooded grounds of the Dalsbruk estate, her warm clothing and flushed cheeks serve as subtle reminders that Finnish summers can be surprisingly chilly.

Ole Kandelin (1920–1947)

Three years before his untimely death of tuberculosis at 26, already struggling with the disease, Ole Kandelin was paving his way from surrealism toward abstract compositions in paintings with allegorical, religious, and philosophical archetypes like Orphan (1943), Mary and The Infant Jesus (1944), and The Rope-Dancer (1944). The latter suggests Kandelin’s nod to Nietzschean ideas of living dangerously and overcoming traditional values to achieve greatness in artistic creation, which were deeply rooted within Finnish-Swedish modernist circles and at the Free Art School where Kandelin studied under the likes of Otto Mäkilä (1904–1955) and Endre Nemes (1909–1985).

The Finnish and Swedish titles, ‘Nuorallatanssija’ and ‘Lindansare’ respectively, are calques from the German ‘Seiltänzer’ – a fairly recognisable character in Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–1885), who falls to death because of a colourful, masked jester mocking him. Kandelin’s tightrope dancer, clad in a harlequin-like costume, seems to merge both figures: the artist taking the risk of overcoming the regulated order of representation and the potential architect of his own demise. Walking emerges as a balancing act between unknown origins and destinations, channelling a solitary experience of vertigo that alters the perception of space and time, bending the world around in the face of death.

Tiina Heiska (b. 1959)

Tiina Heiska’s paintings often explore memory, evoking an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity. She frequently depicts women of different ages, rendered so abstractly that their facial features and surroundings remain indistinct. Often shown in profile or from behind, the figures seem distant yet transcend their individuality to assume a more universal significance.

Images of little girls walking hand in hand evoke the intimacy and vulnerability of childhood, resonating on a deeply human level. Heiska’s compositions have a dreamlike, almost cinematic quality. Her distinctive approach encourages viewers to adopt a more detached perspective on themselves, while inviting them to complete the narratives suggested by her paintings through their own memories and personal associations.

Kimmo Kaivanto (1932–2012)

In the late 1960s, the painter, printmaker and sculptor Kimmo Kaivanto turned his work toward societal criticism to condemn militarism and totalitarianism with a blend of abstraction, pop sensibility, and conceptual play, and the hand as one of his favourite motifs. These three serigraphs from 1969 form a social commentary on repetition and the pressures of modern society to achieve a military and machine-like efficiency in our movements.

Unto Kerttula

Little is known about Unto Kerttula except that he was very active during the 1970s, seemingly working in watercolour painting. Rainy Day on Liisankatu (1973) depicts the corner building at Liisankatu 23 and Snellmaninkatu 16 in Helsinki during a rainy, ordinary day with pedestrian going about their business. The corner remains largely unchanged after more than fifty years: the same flagpoles, the same overhead lines and tracks of the tramway, the same trees on the northern side of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki, even the R-Kioski is still there.

Harry Kivijärvi (1931–2010)

Harry Kivijärvi was a sculptor best known for his abstract modernist works in stone, often carved from black diorite. His early oeuvre, however, was predominantly figurative. The bronze sculpture Strolling (1952) exemplifies this early phase, although the figures’ forms already lean towards abstraction. While their facial features are indistinct, each figure has a distinct character. The group appears to be enjoying a leisurely promenade, conveyed through their unhurried gait and relaxed postures. Their easy demeanour hints at pleasant weather, despite the umbrellas carried by two of the figures. Their attire, meanwhile, places the scene in an urban setting rather than the countryside.

Antti Laitinen (b. 1975)

Antti Laitinen works across a variety of media, although his practice is noted above all for its engagement with landscape. Guided by a conceptual approach, his multidisciplinary oeuvre encompasses photography, video, sculpture, performance, and land and environmental art. In 2004, Laitinen embarked on his Walk the Line project, in which he first printed an image of his own face onto a map and then traversed the landscape by following its contours. Equipped with a GPS tracking device attached to his arm, he recorded the routes he took as he walked. He has produced thirteen self-portraits using this method. The present exhibition brings together several of these images, superimposing them to create a composite portrait. Through these peripatetic self-portraits, Laitinen situates his practice within the tradition of walking art, in which physical movement itself becomes a medium for artistic expression.

Pirkko Lepistö (1922–2005)

Pirkko Lepistö has been regarded as one of the best representatives of the naïve style in Finland. In her work, she often favours greens and blues, capturing the warmth of homes, yards, and social events, including in winter scenes. Movement plays a key role in many of her depictions of people: dancing, horse riding, skiing, playing, and walking. Morning Walk (1972) captures all this with the old couple holding arms, trying not to fall on the slippery ice. Their short, synchronised steps suggest a very slow, careful walk, drawing the attention to the surface they step on and how winter and age slow down the rhythm of life.

Richard Long (b. 1945)

A British pioneer of walking art, Richard Long was among the first artists to make walking itself an artistic medium. Alongside artists such as Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) and Hamish Fulton (b. 1946), he helped establish walking as a recognised artistic practice, inspiring new generations of artists to follow. At the heart of Long’s practice lies the experience of moving through nature and engaging directly with the natural world.

His oeuvre encompasses land and environmental artworks created in situ, as well as works documented or recreated for gallery and museum exhibitions. Measuring approximately ten metres in length, Chalk Line is a minimalist, conceptually driven work composed of white limestone fragments arranged in a geometrical configuration. The work may be experienced as an invitation to contemplation, evoking a path to be followed at a slow, meditative pace.

Timo K. Mukka (1944–1973)

Known primarily as a fiction writer, Timo K. Mukka initially studied fine art in Helsinki, although he never completed his degree. The Finnish National Gallery’s collection holds more than one hundred works by Mukka, most of which are portraits, including a substantial number of self-portraits. Originally from Orajärvi in the municipality of Pello in northern Finland, Mukka drew profound inspiration from the nature and way of life of Lapland, as is evident in both his literary work and visual art. Set against a snowy landscape, his oil pastel Old Woman and Child (1960) invites interpretation within this northern context. With a supple, unforced line, the young artist captures the child’s light, almost skipping gait and the elderly woman’s stooped, shuffling steps with remarkable sensitivity.

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm (1840–1905)

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm graduated from the Düsseldorf Academy in 1865. In his work, winter landscapes and moonlit scenes play a significant role, alongside depictions of rural Finland. As in many of his landscapes, Munsterhjelm highlights road traffic in rural settings by painting tracks left by horse-drawn carts, along which peasants also commute on foot. This painting also features flanking fences fragmenting the countryside and controlling the mobility of people and animals.

Onni Muusari (1890–1917)

Onni Muusari, who died of tuberculosis at the age of just twenty-seven, is remembered primarily as an illustrator. His oeuvre also includes paintings, among them The Treasure Hunter (1910), which is held in the Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation Collection. The work depicts a young nude man approaching a brightly glowing treasure, which may symbolise hidden knowledge or ultimate truth. A similar light shimmers above the seeker’s head, suggesting a connection between the figure and the object of his quest. The image also hints at the need for caution: the treasure seems elusive, as though it might vanish if approached too hastily. In art and literature, the search for knowledge is often portrayed as a journey undertaken by a wanderer. Whether the young man will attain what he seeks remains uncertain, as does the nature of the treasure itself: is it attainable, or merely a mirage?

Olavi Mäkelä (1908–1984)

There is little known about Olavi Mäkelä except that he was very active between late 1930s and 1950s, working primarily with watercolour and charcoal on paper with a preference for winter scenes in the city with few to no human figures. In Vanhankaupunki Waterworks (1947), the artist depicts two older women having passed each other near an industrial site during a rainy day, emphasising the blurry reflections on the wet pavement.

Eva Olsoni (1908–1994)

Eva Olsoni studied in Helsinki, London and Paris, and worked as a painter, textile and craft artist for companies like Stockmann and Kotivilla Oy in Tammisaari, as well as a costume designer for the Helsinki City Theatre and the Swedish Theatre. Many of her oil paintings are characterised by colourful bright tones pushing towards extreme white. The Latin-Germanic expression anno dazumal, “once upon a time”, suggests a look into the old days – the memory of a bright day with walking figures carrying parasols to protect themselves from the sun.

Juho Rissanen (1873–1950)

As the son of a working-class family in Kuopio, Juho Rissanen dedicated his art to depict ordinary people and their work. The watercolour sketch A Childhood Memory (c. 1900–1903) stems from a personal tragedy – the death of his alcoholic father who froze on an icy lake walking back home when Juho was ten. He reworked this memory in various images between 1900 and 1903 as part of a larger unfinished project. The composition captures such traumatic moment as a kind of funeral procession.

The oil study Three Musicians (1928) is a later work from when Rissanen lived in France and as part of a commission to paint the Helkajuhlat frescos at the National Theatre in Helsinki. The three rural musicians walk in step with each other through a pine and birch grove towards a village festival, with the fiddler leading the group without playing while the pipers behind command the rhythm with a single melody. The composition resembles Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921, Philadelphia version), where the musicians play a fiddle, a woodwind instrument, and an accordion.

Hanna Saarikoski (b. 1978)

Working across a wide range of media, Hanna Saarikoski is represented in this exhibition by two videos and an installation. In the video C (2018), the artist walks in continuous circles, wearing a full-body suit composed of hundreds of pieces of charcoal. As she moves, she gradually leaves a carbon imprint on a blank sheet of paper, evoking humanity’s continued dependence on carbon-intensive ways of life. Her circular path suggests an apparently inescapable cycle of fossil fuel dependency and consumption. Climate change is also the focus of Phases of Ice (2025), which addresses the threat posed by melting glaciers and rising sea levels. No matter how carefully the artist treads, her ice shoes are destined to melt. In the installation Cc (2025), the only traces of human presence are abandoned shoes scattered across the ground. Saarikoski made these paper shoes using lasts inherited from her grandfather.

Heli Salonen (s. 1949)

Heli Salonen is a Helsinki-born printmaker who has worked extensively in etching and aquatint. Her prints start from childhood memories, personal experiences and dreams, as well as motifs from her own photographs taken along journeys. She keeps her titles simple, allowing viewers to interpret her works through their own experience. The street scene Monday (1983) on Aleksis Kivi Street belongs to a series of snapshots from Helsinki between 1979 and 1983 with solitary pedestrians, walking alone together, often with their hands in the pockets. Her style is noticeably inspired by Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) as well as the black and white architecture and street shots of André Kretész (1894–1985), Walker Evans (1903–1975), and Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004). Salonen has also worked as teacher, contributing important work in occupational safety for printmakers and visual artists.

Hugo Simberg (1873–1917)

Hugo Simberg explored the theme of death from a variety of perspectives throughout his career. At the Gate of Tuonela(1898) depicts a group of cloaked skeletons escorting people of different ages to the threshold of the underworld. The elderly travellers move with stooped backs, while the young child in the foreground sets out on the journey with an upright posture and squared shoulders. One of the skeletons gently cradles a dog in its arms, accompanying it towards its final hunting grounds. Simberg often portrayed death as a sympathetic, even compassionate figure, rather than one to be feared. 

Towards Evening (1913), a print adapted from one of Simberg’s celebrated paintings, revisits this contrast between age and youth, expressed through the figures’ distinct gaits and postures. To the Church (1897), meanwhile, depicts a hunched elderly woman making her way along a narrow path, leaning heavily on a walking stick and holding books securely under her arm. Her laboured gait conveys a sense of vulnerability, shaped by advanced age, the weight of her belongings, and the suggestion of physical frailty.

Ivan Šiškin (1832–1898)

Renowned for his forest scenes, the Russian artist Ivan Šiškin established himself not only as a painter but also as a professor of painting. His lyrical, meticulously executed landscapes are rich in detail and grounded in sustained, close observation of nature. Šiškin was associated with the Wanderers (Peredvižniki), a group of Russian artists whose most famous member was Ilya Repin (1844–1930). The Wanderers sought to portray everyday life and Russian subject matter with realism while maintaining a degree of artistic independence from prevailing social and political constraints.

The group’s name reflected its ambition to bring art to a wider audience, an aim pursued through travelling exhibitions that reached rural areas. Although the authorities branded the group as dissidents, Šiškin’s landscapes are perhaps best understood as celebrations of the Russian natural world. In both subject matter and composition, Šiškin’s Pine Forest(1878) recalls The Chasseur in the Woods (1814) by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich. In both works, a solitary figure makes his way through a rugged forest, dwarfed by towering trees, as though nearing the end of his life. 

Per Stenius (1922–2014)

No longer being able to ignore the radical challenge that Ole Kandelin brought to the Free Art School, his fellow classmate Per Stenius found a path between literal representation and total abstraction, debuting in 1947, the year Kandelin passed away. Such synthesis of figuration and abstraction is especially embodied in paintings from his extensive travels by car to India starting in 1953. Street Scene, India (1971) draws on these journeys, placing the viewer within an intensively illuminated bustling Indian street with vendors and pedestrians passing by, all rendered in Stenius’s favoured palette of vibrant, hot colours in segmented forms.

Ivan Timiriasew (1860–1927)

The Russian cavalry officer and adjutant to the Russian Governor General in Finland, Ivan Timiriasew, became a passionate amateur photographer in the 1890s and remained a photojournalist after retiring from his military career in 1917. These photographs are a tiny representation of his valuable contribution in documenting the daily life in the streets of Helsinki in times of peace and civil war.

Sakari Tohka (1911–1958)

Sakari Tohka studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and belonged to the Lokakuun ryhmä (October Group). He made numerous public works across Finland, and received the Pro Finlandia medal. Sculpture The Storm (1935) of a woman carrying her child against the strong storm winds belongs to an early period but already features the rugged and rhythmic aspects of Tohka’s later work.

Markku Valtonen (s. 1966)

Markku Valtonen is a rock musician and self-taught artist, working across drawing and sculpture. His wooden and terracotta sculptures are characterised by humour and colourful tones. Evening Stroll (2017) is composed by two whimsical figures with Fez-like hats, walking with hands in the pockets. Their gait is synchronised, relaxed, cool, almost dandy-like, as if they enjoy displaying themselves and being watched.

Ekke Väli (s. 1952)

Besides numerous iconic public monuments across Estonia, Ekke Väli has created independent sculptural works characterised by a powerful blend of nature-based abstraction, fragmentation, geometric shapes, distortion, and nuanced humour and cultural criticism. Bronze sculpture The Great Hurrier (1987) captures the haste of modern urban life with a fragmented walking body partially clad in a business suit while remaining rooted in the ground, naked and barefoot.

Mark Wallinger (b. 1959)

British artist and 2007 Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger has explored a wide range of media throughout his career, with self-portraiture occupying a prominent place in his oeuvre. Shadow Walker (2011) is also a kind of self-portrait, although the artist appears only as a shadow. The work follows Wallinger as he walks along Shaftesbury Avenue in London, shifting the focus to the street itself. Against a backdrop of traffic noise and murmuring voices, details of the pavement come to the fore, punctuated by glimpses of shop signs.

The figure of the urban wanderer has deep cultural roots. In the context of London, literary examples include John Gay’s (1685–1732) poem Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) and Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) short story The Man of the Crowd (1840). In the visual arts, a parallel can be found in the shadow self-portraits taken by American photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) in urban settings, including New York City (1965).

Victoria Åberg (1824–1892)

Victoria Åberg was a Düsseldorf-school landscape painter and one of the first professional Finnish women artists with a sustained career. Landscape from Germany (1860) dates back from her early years in Germany, featuring a realistic pastoral scene with a peasant woman and her daughter, both walking barefoot on a country road. The topography of the place, with the lake below in the background, accentuates the laborious task of carrying load uphill on foot.