In the Footsteps of painter Richard Hall

Photograph of Richard Hall's painting Gustav Vasa as a child in front of King Hans, 1881. Photo: correspondence of Mauri R. Hall, Pori Art Museum archive   I have written about Richard Hall's time as a student in the blog post Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts . In it, he tells of winning the Royal Prize Medal in his final year of study. The medal was the highest state award for a graduating student. On the other hand, by the time the prize was awarded in 1881, there were already signs of protest among young artists against the old-fashioned way of teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts. The main source for this article is Maria Görts' doctoral thesis Det sköna i verklighetens värld: akademisk konstsyn i Sverige under senare delen av 1800-talet , 1999 ( Beauty and the world of reality: Academic Aesthetic Attitudes in Sweden during the late Ninteeth Century). Shared first prize The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts organised the Royal Medal competition in 1881. The theme wa...

    A view from the Ateneum's collection exhibition A Question of Time. On the left Gallen-Kallela's Démasquée, center Antell´s portrait by the same artist, on the right Hall's Odalisque. On top Charles-François Daubigny's The Rising Moon on the River Bank. While exploring the archives of the National Gallery, I also got to see Richard Hall's painting Odalisque. It was on display in the Ateneum's exhibition The Question of Time, in a section on the H. F. Antell collection. Among others, the well-known Démasquée by Akseli Gallen-Kallela from 1888 was hung in the same set. The collector Antell's order Herman Frithiof Antell (1847-1893) was born in Vaasa and trained as a doctor. During his lifetime, he amassed important collections of coins, artefacts and works of art with the help of a million-dollar inheritance from his father. From 1877 he had a permanent residence in Paris. Tuukka Talvio has written in Finnish a comprehensive and detailed biography of Antel...

Peter Paul Rubens: The Three Graces, (1620-1624)     Already in early spring I was in contact with the research services of the Finnish National Gallery, because they were about to move their collection. As a result, the archival material had to be ordered in advance so that it could be viewed in the summer. A lot of material was there, including newspaper clippings, a few letters written by Hall and literature in which the artist is mentioned. Let's start with the letters: they concerned a painting that had been in an exhibition at the Finnish Art Society, and which Hall wanted to find. Rubens' The Three Graces Hall studied at the Stockholm Academy of Fine Arts from 1875 to 1881. During his studies, he probably painted a copy of The Three Graces by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Copies of paintings by old masters were a common practice in art education at the time. It was a way of familiarising oneself with the masters' painting techniques and treatment of the subject matt...