Robert Wilhelm Ekman

• Robert Wilhelm Ekman : Kreeta Haapasalo soittaa kannelta talonpoikaistuvassa, 1868, 75x105 cm, oil, canvas (A I 42) (51.7 kB)

Ekman's pictures of peasant life, on the other hand, were received with much more understanding. Kreeta Haapasalo Playing the Kantele in a Peasant Cottage (1868) shows a scene from the life of a crofter's wife who during the great famine of the 1860s maintained her family by singing and playing the Kantele. Kreeta Haapasalo was seen as a personification of the mythological past of the Kalevala. It was believed that through her it would be possible to achieve a direct contact with the genuine spirit of the Kalevala and its thousand-year- old instrument, the kantele. The Finns were believed to be a nation that relied on 'the power of words', on knowledge and civilisation. After all, Finnish folk poetry, too, emphasized nationalism as an alternative to the celebration of military prowess in the poetry of the Scandinavian neighbours.

The ethical values attached to the people are reflected all over Ekman's picture of Kreeta Haapasalo. The peasant cottage interior has been painted with ethnological accuracy, every coffee cup and chairleg with precision and care. At the same time the picture is a portrait of the entire class society: a veteran of the Crimean war, a little boy, a fisherman mending his net, peasant women and ladies of the upper class who have come to listen to the music. Together they form a national romantic dream of a united, classless Finnish nation. Tsar Aleksandr I of Russia keeps an eye on the political situation from a colour picture that hangs on the wall and which is signed by the artist.

Kreeta Haapasalo soittaa kannelta talonpoikaistuvassa