Visual arts Journalist Unto Hämäläinen has admired a certain painting by Gallen-Kallela for decades – In an exhibition he was amazed and began to find out the background to the work.

Love the painting has lasted for over forty years.

It started when I found a painting among dozens of paintings at the Ateneum. On display was Akseli Gallen-Kallelan work.

The name of the painting was Keitele. Its subject was Supisuomalainen: the back of a lake with gray stripes, an island in the background and a blue forest shore.

Maybe it was just homeland love. A peasant boy could be hit by homesickness in Helsinki, because I grew up on the shore of Keitele.

However, the love affair became permanent. Keitele was featured in almost all of Gallen-Kallela’s exhibitions, and I was happy to linger next to it. It was a short trip to Central Finland.

Then Homeland trips suddenly ended.

In late June 1999, I read that Gallen-Kallela painting Keitele was sold at the Sotheby’s art auction in London.

The name of the seller of the painting was not disclosed. Apparently he had been Finnish. The painting had been purchased by “a private collector”.

The deal attracted a lot of attention, as the price was a whopping FIM 2.24 million, currently EUR 470,000. It was the highest price paid for a painting by a Finnish artist at the time.

The National Gallery in London announced that Keitele had moved into its collections. The buyer, “a private collector,” had apparently donated the painting to the museum.

A few a year later I went to the Gallen-Kallela Museum in Tarvaspää, Espoo. There were dozens of his paintings on display, and I found them in the crowd as well Keiteleen.

The surprise grew when I noticed that there was a “Private Collection” next to the billboard.

Why didn’t it read the National Gallery? Museums lend works to each other’s exhibitions, but it is customary to tell from which museum a painting or sculpture is on loan.

The contradiction then remained unresolved.

It came to my mind when in April 2012 I met the Director General of the State Art Museum Risto Ruohonen. He said there were two exhibitions of Akseli Gallen-Kallela in Europe that spring.

One was at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the other at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

I would ask Ruohonen, in which show Keitele was.

“In both,” he replied. It was only in this discussion that it was revealed to me that there were two Keiteleboard.

Ruohonen said that the painting in the London Museum was in Paris. The painting was borrowed from the Lahti Art Museum in Amsterdam.

I took it contacted the Lahti Art Museum and asked where the museum had obtained it Keiteleen. Amanuensis of the museum Maija-Riitta Kallio said that the Vyborg Association of Art Friends had already purchased the painting in 1906.

Gallen-Kallela had painted paintings in 1904, when he spent the summer on the shore of Keitele in the Konginkangas parish in Lintula’s house.

The painting was on display in the Vyborg Art Museum in the 1930s, and was moved to Lahti during the war. The painting is owned by the Vyborg Foundation. It is held at the Lahti Art Museum, but the painting is often lent to exhibitions.

Finally, Kallio pointed out that there is still a third one in the Tarvaspää Museum Keitele.

Aha. I had lived for decades in the delusion that my love had had only one object. There had been three of them.

Tarvaspää exhibition manager Minna Turtiainen confirmed that the museum has its own Keitele. The painting is owned by a private individual, but it is kept in a warehouse, in a secret place.

According to the register of works, Gallen-Kallela had painted three Keitele in 1904–1905.

The boards differ slightly in size, and yes, they look different if you can look at them.

But did Akseli Gallen-Kallela still paint the fourth? Keiteleen?

There is no mention of the fourth Keitele in the Tarvaspää book register, but a website Museum of Destroyed Art says one Keitele would have been destroyed in 2002.

The owner of the painting was a Finnish private individual who lost several other valuable paintings in a fire. A site administrator Juho Tamminen refused to provide any other information about the painting.

“We have photographed a low-quality copy of a Gallen-Kallela painting, partly damaged by fire, Keitele. The filming has taken place in the home of the previous owner of the work, and we have no reason to doubt the sad fate of the work, ”Tamminen said.

If you know anything about the fourth Keitele, let me know. Or the fifth …

I wrote Gallen-Kallelan About Keitele for the first time in May 2012 in the Monthly Supplement.

A week after the publication of the story, a thick letter arrived from Spain with a picture of it being privately owned About Keitele and a copy of the ancient certificate of authenticity and also other documents.

The painting had been in the possession of the same Finnish family for several decades, possibly since the beginning of the last century. I did a follow-up story to the June 2012 Monthly Supplement, where pictures of all four Keitele were published.

The news of the discovery of the fourth Keitele even attracted international attention and interest grew when an exhibition was held in Tarvaspää in the spring of 2014. How Many Cooks?

I went to talk about the discovery of the fourth Keitele at the exhibition seminar. Among the listeners was also the ex-prime minister Matti Vanhanenfrom whose expert questions I concluded that he was familiar with Gallen-Kallela’s work and especially Keiteleen.

After the show I got Louis Vuittonin a letter from the Paris Art Foundation stating that the Foundation intended to receive all four Soup simultaneously displayed and inquired about the contact details of the owner of the fourth board. I sent a message to Spain and got permission from the owner to give the Paris Art Foundation contact information. In all communications with the owner of the board, extreme care had to be taken, as the owner did not want to tell in detail where the board was stored or other information.

Messaging after my connection Keitele-painted, but the old love for them has survived, so now for forty years.

When HS’s Teema magazine about Akseli Gallen-Kallela was started to be designed in the autumn of 2021, I decided to find out what has happened to my destinations in recent years.

I opened National Gallery website and immediately after the opening the familiar lake landscape was visible. From that, I concluded that things are going well in London.

I asked the Tarvaspää and Lahti museums how their paintings can, and had the exhibition of the Luis Vuitton Art Foundation been realized?

Yes. All four Keitels were on display at the Louis Vuitton Art Foundation exhibition in Paris in 2015 and also at the National Gallery exhibition in London at the turn of 2017-2018.

The National Gallery published four About Keitele also a book Lake Keitele – A Vision of Finlandprovided by Anne Robbins.

The Keitels at Tarvaspää and Lahti Art Museum are doing well and have a constant export to the world. Tarvaspää Keitele is going to the next exhibition of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and Lahti Keitele will be present at the opening exhibition of the new Museum of Visual Arts in Malva.

The Lahti Museum says that Keitele is the museum’s most sought-after work, the “pearl of pearls” that enchants art lovers year after year.

The article was originally published in the HS Monthly Supplement in May 2012. It has now been republished with updated information. HS’s Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s 100-page Teema magazine was published on 16 February. For more information, visit the Theme magazine at HS.fi/theme.