National costumes and Serlachius | Serlachius+

Milla Sinivuori-Hakanen, Senior CuratorWhen you immerse yourself in a subject, you begin to notice related details and clues in the most unexpected places. Alongside my day job, I make and teach the making of Finnish national costumes. So, the subject has, strangely enough, begun to appear in my work with the Serlachius collections too.

Finnish national costumes are enjoying a revival. Costumes discovered at the back of wardrobes or on flea-market rails are being repaired and restored for new generations. The most enthusiastic devotees own several costumes and are very good at finding reasons to wear them. The so-called national costume airings culminate each year on 5 August, the birthday of the Finnish national costume – a story well known to those in the know.

On 5 August 1885, Tsar Alexander III of Russia and his consort Maria Feodorovna visited Lappeenranta. As part of the festivities, Finnish women presented the Empress with a rowing boat richly decorated with skilled needlework. It was rowed to her by eight young women dressed in national costumes from different provinces, while a married woman wearing the Jääski costume held the tiller.

The story resurfaces every year, neatly condensed for event communications. My work involves looking for information in contemporary sources, and so I went to them in search of further details about this particular moment in history. The imperial couple’s visit was described at length in several newspapers at the time. In Uusi Suometar on 6 August 1885, each costume is described in detail.

“Holding the stern as the boat was rowed forward was Mrs Emilie de Pont, née Linder, wife of the commander of the Kuopio Battalion, dressed in the Jääski costume (a black-blue baize skirt edged with a red flounce; an apron embroidered according to eastern Finnish patterns, with insert lace; an embroidered shirt; a black bodice; a white baize short jacket; a silver neck brooch; a veil; brown leather boots edged with red saffian; red stockings).”

What on earth is saffian? And hang on – Emilie de Pont? The same person from whom Gösta Serlachius bought, almost five decades later, one of the best-known paintings in his collection: Gunnar Berndtson’s Art Connoisseurs in the Louvre. Until then, Emilie de Pont had been to me mainly a name among thousands in the Serlachius correspondence. I knew that Finna, in the Finnish Heritage Agency’s picture collections, held images of the costumes seen during the Lappeenranta visit. Might there be a photograph of her there too?

I found an 1882 photograph of a beautiful young woman with her recently wedded husband. Three years later, when she steered the boat from the stern, she was 24 years old. My mental image of a “Mrs” had been something quite different.

No image of Emilie de Pont in the Jääski costume seems to be available online, but we can glean something of her appearance from a painting made ten years later and now in the Serlachius art collection: Pekka Halonen’s Maidens on the Headlands (1895). The “maiden” standing in the foreground is the artist’s wife, Maija Halonen, whose dress is easily recognisable as the Jääski costume despite the puff sleeves and hourglass waist of the jacket. She is not wearing a black bodice, and the saffian of the stockings – which the internet kindly informed me is goatskin – is not visible.

On the “maiden’s” head is a metal-studded headband, a säppäli, unlike the adult Mrs de Pont, who wore a veil. The domed silver brooch, historically used in Finnish national costumes to fasten the slit at the neckline, has wandered down to the waist. Perhaps even in the late nineteenth century the brooch was as great a mystery as it has been to later generations. Today we can study how it works in social-media videos.

People’s understanding of the garments may have been poor because those who compiled and wore national costumes were on culturally unfamiliar ground – just as we are today. The compilation of national costumes, based on the dress of the common people, was originally an upper-class pursuit, part of the ideological and artistic current that had gathered strength since the early nineteenth century, in which folk culture was recorded and idealised. In contemporary terms, one might perhaps sharpen the point and say that the roots of Finnish national costume lie in cultural appropriation and LARPing.

Decades later, folk tradition also inspired Gösta Serlachius. We know of his collaboration with Hannes Autere, known for his depictions of rural people, in the fields of building culture, interiors and art. Serlachius commissioned from him, among other things, carvings for furniture and drawings for buildings on his estates.

In the museum archive I came across a Finnish rya rug, ryijy, design by Autere. Its peasant subject shows a woman on the porch of a farmhouse, waving to men driving past in a trap. The house can be identified as the main building of Serlachius’ Huhkojärvi estate.

The figures’ clothing is folk-like. The men are wearing knee breeches and short jackets, or röijyt. Both have high-crowned felt hats, like the one in the emblem of the National Costume Council of Finland. Beneath one man’s jacket peeps a red-and-yellow striped waistcoat – or perhaps the stripes represent a striking tablet-woven belt.

The woman’s costume bears a strong resemblance to the Central Finland national costume. Its characteristic features are a blue-and-red striped skirt, a blue bodice and a stiff silk-covered cap with a separate lace worn under it. Introduced in 1921 as the Jyväskylä costume, Central Finland’s first national costume became highly popular and was probably familiar to Autere, who was born in Saarijärvi. It is not far-fetched to think that the costume was deliberately chosen for the textile’s subject – after all, the Huhkojärvi estate was in Koskenpää, in Central Finland.

The museum collections do not reveal how precise the instructions were that Serlachius gave Autere for the textile. A documented connection between national costumes and Serlachius did emerge, however, when a colleague, as a by-product of her own research, noticed an intriguing article in a local newspaper from 1934.

The text reveals that Serlachius supported the making of the Kuorevesi costume and promised a grant of 50 marks to every woman who acquired one. At the same time, it becomes clear that he had offered financial support for a similar purpose to women in the areas around Huhkojärvi – perhaps the rya rug really did show the Central Finland costume!

The matter crops up again later in Serlachius’ plan for his 60th birthday in 1936: “The Kuorevesi girls who received a national costume from me could be invited to the Club to serve.”

What made an industrial magnate take an interest in national costumes? We know that Serlachius valued traditional hand skills, which is why weaving courses, for example, were organised both at Huhkojärvi and in Mänttä. Depictions of the common people were a subject he liked in art. As a patriotic man, Serlachius was also fond of presenting things he regarded as distinctively Finnish – for example, by having a Finnish sauna built in England. And, just as now, national costumes were enjoying a boom in the 1920s and 1930s.

After all the information and material found by chance, I wanted to see what could be discovered in the Serlachius collections if one searched for national costumes. The archive produced one memoir, referring to the wearing of national costumes at festivities in the early twentieth century.

The photograph database brought up 13 images of celebrations or individual people. Of course, I knew that many more could be found among the numerous photographs of festivities – I had already spotted them there with my “national-costume glasses” on. With search terms such as *choir* and *pensioner*, I found some forty further images of national costumes.

In the art collection database, the search results showed three works. One was the Halonen painting mentioned above, another Hannes Autere’s Rustic Festivities (1919) – which in fact probably depicts folk dress – and the third Lennart Segerstråle’s Woman in National Costume Seated on a Bench. It is a study for the mural Uusimaa Song, and the inventory number reveals that there are other works belonging to the same body of works.

Altogether I find thirty studies, in which national costume appears in 18 works. The watercolour and gouache studies date from 1935, when Segerstråle used them as the basis for a mural measuring three by nine metres for the cultural centre Svenska Gården in Borgå.

There are several studies of the seated woman dressed in the Borgå costume, and from them the costume would be identifiable even without knowing the subject of the work: a narrow-striped blue-and-red skirt, a vertically striped apron, a belt pocket edged in yellow and a blue bodice. In the groups of figures in the larger studies there are other national costumes too: perhaps the brownish Sibbo costume and the costume of Helsinge parish with its horizontally striped skirt. A red-toned costume with a white apron may point to the costume of Borgå parish or Askola.

The women in the studies appear to be wearing linen bonnets — white, scarf-like linen headgear – rather than the silk caps. I wondered whether Segerstråle found the stiff silk-covered cap unflattering, as some wearers do today, or whether the models simply happened to have linen bonnets.

Kirsi Marja Sund’s book Seinälle maalattu laulu, which discusses the mural, reveals that the woman posing for the artist was dressed in a simple white scarf tied at the nape of the neck. What, I wonder, happened to the headgear that belonged to the costume?

A national-costume-minded trawl through the Serlachius collections brought to light some intriguing objects, but it also made concrete a basic fact of research: catalogue records alone will never reveal everything that exists. In the databases, a search for national costumes produced about 24 per cent of what I eventually found by leafing through papers and photographs

Our archive also contains hundreds of shelf metres of documents – millions of individual sheets of paper – whose contents are not catalogued one by one, and which will certainly not all be digitised and converted into machine-readable form for the consumption of artificial intelligence, at least not in my lifetime. Finding information in archives and collections usually requires good background knowledge and long hours of browsing through material.

The idea that the search results of some database could provide precise information, on any subject whatsoever, about all the relevant storage units, photographs or works of art is very far indeed from reality. But all the greater, then, is the joy of discovery.