Tove Jansson at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki

My friend being the good friend she is, even got me the name and phone number of the curator, so that I could take photos of the exhibition, as ‘an important blogger’! In fact I took pictures for the Finn-Guild Horisontti magazine too – and wore my first Finn-Guild press badge proudly.

The Ateneum exhibition charts Jansson’s development as artist – painter, illustrator and writer – chronologically. It also has pieces by her painter father, and many charming self-portraits of the artist herself. There are copies of political illustrations Tove Jansson made for a satirical magazine Garm during the 2nd world war, as well as many original prints of the much beloved Muumin drawings. The most charming of the displays are paper mâché (or to give them their correct description: mixed medium) pieces of the characters and the Muumin houses. These were all in glass cases, and I tried my best to get good images of them.

When I returned to the apartment where I was staying, and looked out of the window, I saw where Tove Jansson got her inspiration for some of the Muumin landscapes. The pastel coloured houses with pointy turrets and dark slate roofs of Ullanlinna, the part of Helsinki where Jansson lived, are very similar to the blue Moomin house. And the bare trees reminded me of the dark forests of the melancholy Moomin tales.