Artist Biography

Hugo Simberg

1873 – 1917

Hugo Gerhard Simberg (24 June 1873 – 12 July 1917) was a Finnish symbolist painter and graphic artist, widely regarded as a leading figure in Finnish Symbolism for his mystical, allegorical works that blended folklore, spirituality, and themes of death and resilience. Drawing on his country's rich folk traditions, he depicted a vividly imaginative world in which devils and angels and personifications of Death and Frost mingle with humans. In such work his style was colourful and bizarre, sometimes with an almost naive quality of freshness. Simberg occupies a position in the history of Finnish art that has no precise equivalent in any other national tradition. Working at the junction of European Symbolism and Finnish National Romanticism, at a historical moment when Finland was struggling toward cultural and eventually political independence from the Russian Empire, he created a body of work of extraordinary originality — an art in which death is a familiar, the devil a sympathetic wretch, and the wounded angel an image of quiet, unassuming beauty that has become, in the vote of his own countrymen, the national painting of Finland.