Lemminkäisen arvoitus

► A lot of us know Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s painting Lemminkäinen’s Mother, but there is another work on the same subject whose origin is oddly uncertain. In its subject and form this gouache painting could well be a far-advanced sketch for Lemminkäinen’s Mother, but Gallen-­Kallela denied that he had painted the work.

So is it genuine or fake? The art collector and Gallen-Kallela’s friend Gösta Serlachius tried for a long time to establish the provenance of the work, which he bought in 1930, but came to a dead end. Since 2015, a research group has been trying to solve the mystery by combining a range of the latest technologies with art-history research.

In this volume art historians Tarja Talvitie of the Serlachius Museums and Minna Turtiainen of the Gallen-Kallela Museum pose this art-­history riddle and ponder the authenticity of this disputed work.