Left: my tracing, green then black. Right: Helene Schjerfbeck, Self-Portrait, 1895, oil on canvas — Ekenäs Museum Center EKTA, Ekenäs (Tammisaari), Finland. Public domain.
This is the one I tried in color first. I started with green, because that’s close to how she handles the light where her face meets the background in the actual painting — but on its own it was too faint to read, so I went over it with black. On the two eyes specifically I reversed the order, black under green instead of over, because the eyes needed to hold more weight on the page than anywhere else — though I’m not entirely sure why that felt right.
I left off the eye-socket shadow initially, but added a line along the top of the nose, one at the base of the nostril, and a black line marking the boundary between the two lips. Then one ridge line, low across the cheek — not invented, but lifted straight from one of her own value transitions, there to help the shadow orient the face.
I’m trying to add as little as possible, incrementally — doing a little, then stopping, stepping back, judging if there’s too much missing, and if so, what’s the least I can add. Then iterating.
There’s a psychological spareness, I think, that comes with age — we don’t care for the ebullience of youth, just the basics. We’ve lost too many brain cells to the stresses of life, haha!
Helene Schjerfbeck painted herself for over sixty years — from a young woman in the 1880s to her skeletal studies in her last months, working days before she died in 1946. This 1895 painting is still fully representational, but spare, with nothing but the face expressing. Her market took a long time to catch up with her work: a 2008 Sotheby’s London sale of Tanssiaiskengät (Dancing Shoes), estimated at £500,000–700,000, sold for roughly £3 million (about $6 million) — and her Royal Academy retrospective in 2019 introduced her properly outside Scandinavia for the first time.
Helene Schjerfbeck, Dancing Shoes (Tanssiaiskengät), 1882, oil on canvas — the painting behind that 2008 record sale, private collection since. Public domain.
Image credits. Helene Schjerfbeck died in 1946 — public domain in countries with a life-plus-70-years term (Finland included, since 2017), and in the US as a pre-1931 work. Self-Portrait (1895) is held at Ekenäs Museum Center EKTA (Länsi-Uudenmaan maakuntamuseo) in Ekenäs (Tammisaari), Finland.
Links
- Self-Portrait, 1895 — Wikimedia Commons — full-resolution image; held at Ekenäs Museum Center EKTA, Finland
- Dancing Shoes, 1882 — Wikimedia Commons — the 2008 record-sale painting discussed above
- Helene Schjerfbeck — Wikipedia