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Lot Essay
‘All you need to do is to look like an Angel of the Lord’, Helene Schjerfbeck told her young model Katri when she came to sit for her. (Cedercreutz- Suhonen; Bergström, p. 53). Katri Sahrman was only three years old when she and her sister Marta were portrayed in Sisters in 1913. Helene Schjerfbeck was very fond of the four children (Elma, Einar, Martta and Katri) in the Sahrman family who lived opposite on the same street in Hyvinkää. She loved children for models and the Sahrman children were easily at hand.
Katri, the youngest, remained one of her favourite child models for many years. Sitting for the present picture Katri is between 11 and 12 years old. She is no longer the ’angel’ she was in the earlier pictures but rather looks like a mischievous little girl. As usual Schjerfbeck worked on and reworked the painting many times. She would wash off with a piece of cloth, somteimes scrape off something she had tried and wasn’t pleased with. We know from a letter to her friend, collector and biographer Einar Reuter that she tried a small crown on the head of Katri in the present picture, inspired by the Swedish painter Ivar Arosenius’ fairy-tale ’queen of mice’, which she later washed off. The mouth of Katri, which she reworked months after having signed her picture, met the same fate. She was trying to give it the look of a rosebud as she had observed on Katri walking by in the street one day. In the end she painted Katri Smiling, as we see her in the picture and the title suggests, but Schjerfbeck was not entirely happy as she had not been able to render the expression she had once seen in Katri’s face. (Einar Reuter alias A.Ahtela, Helena Schjerfbeck, 1953, p. 185).
This was not unusual with Helene Schjerfbeck. She was hardly ever satisfied with a finished work, and would have a hard time to accept parting with it - were it for an exhibition, to her art dealer Gösta Stenman or doctor and collector Erkki Calonius, who lived nearby, the former owner of this work. Schjerfbeck moved after her mother’s death from the house opposite the Sahrman family in early 1923 and the almost daily encounter with the Sahrman family comes to an end. During the final years of her life at the Saltsjöbaden Spahospital in Sweden where her dealer and friend Gösta Stenman brought her to escape warstricken Finland she paints, lacking models, replicas of her most favoured subjects among others the Sisters and Katri Smiling. In the end she managed in her final Katri smiling picture from 1945 to combine Katri’s smile with a rosebud mouth and still keep Katri’s angelic expression.
Katri, the youngest, remained one of her favourite child models for many years. Sitting for the present picture Katri is between 11 and 12 years old. She is no longer the ’angel’ she was in the earlier pictures but rather looks like a mischievous little girl. As usual Schjerfbeck worked on and reworked the painting many times. She would wash off with a piece of cloth, somteimes scrape off something she had tried and wasn’t pleased with. We know from a letter to her friend, collector and biographer Einar Reuter that she tried a small crown on the head of Katri in the present picture, inspired by the Swedish painter Ivar Arosenius’ fairy-tale ’queen of mice’, which she later washed off. The mouth of Katri, which she reworked months after having signed her picture, met the same fate. She was trying to give it the look of a rosebud as she had observed on Katri walking by in the street one day. In the end she painted Katri Smiling, as we see her in the picture and the title suggests, but Schjerfbeck was not entirely happy as she had not been able to render the expression she had once seen in Katri’s face. (Einar Reuter alias A.Ahtela, Helena Schjerfbeck, 1953, p. 185).
This was not unusual with Helene Schjerfbeck. She was hardly ever satisfied with a finished work, and would have a hard time to accept parting with it - were it for an exhibition, to her art dealer Gösta Stenman or doctor and collector Erkki Calonius, who lived nearby, the former owner of this work. Schjerfbeck moved after her mother’s death from the house opposite the Sahrman family in early 1923 and the almost daily encounter with the Sahrman family comes to an end. During the final years of her life at the Saltsjöbaden Spahospital in Sweden where her dealer and friend Gösta Stenman brought her to escape warstricken Finland she paints, lacking models, replicas of her most favoured subjects among others the Sisters and Katri Smiling. In the end she managed in her final Katri smiling picture from 1945 to combine Katri’s smile with a rosebud mouth and still keep Katri’s angelic expression.