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The Garden of Death | Hugo Simberg | 1896

The Garden of Death | Hugo Simberg | 1896

€32,95
€32,95
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About the artwork:

Hugo Simberg’s The Garden of Death from 1896 is one of the clearest examples of how Symbolist painting could make death feel strange, calm, and almost domestic rather than violent. In this small work, hooded figures associated with death are shown tending flowers with quiet care, which turns a frightening subject into a scene about transition, ritual, and spiritual continuity. That reversal is central to Simberg’s art, since he often treated supernatural or religious imagery with an unusual mix of innocence, melancholy, and simplicity. The painting’s meaning is strengthened by Simberg’s own idea that this garden was a place where the dead remain before going to heaven, which gives the image a temporary and almost compassionate vision of the afterlife rather than a final judgment. It is also relevant that Simberg returned to this subject more than once, including in a later fresco version, which suggests that this theme was not incidental but one of the key expressions of his artistic world.

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  • Title The Garden of Death (Kuoleman puutarha)
  • Artist Hugo Gerhard Simberg (Finnish Symbolist painter, watercolourist and graphic artist; Hamina, Grand Duchy of Finland, Russian Empire, 24 June 1873 - Ähtäri, 12 July 1917; pupil of Akseli Gallen-Kallela)
  • Year of creation 1896 (one of the most beloved icons of Finnish Symbolism and Simberg's signature subject, made when he was twenty-three years old, two years after he began studying under Akseli Gallen-Kallela. The composition depicts three skeletal black-clad figures of Death, tenderly tending and watering a row of potted plants in a small enclosed garden — a sweetly humorous, almost childlike inversion of the conventional terrifying Grim Reaper, who here is recast as a quiet gentle gardener. Simberg, who was almost always reluctant to explain the symbolism of his work, made an exception for this picture: he noted on a preparatory sketch that the garden is "the place where the dead end up before going to Heaven." Each potted plant is a human soul awaiting transition into the afterlife — the implication being that humans in their earthly form are as undeveloped compared with their paradisiacal selves as a child is compared with an adult. The image was a lifelong favourite of Simberg's, who returned to it in several versions and techniques, most famously in a large fresco painted in 1905-1906 on the south wall of the Tampere Cathedral, where he was commissioned alongside Gallen-Kallela to decorate the new church and where his Wounded Angel — voted Finland's "national painting" in a 2006 Ateneum public vote — also appears. The Ateneum's watercolour is the earliest and smallest version)
  • Technique/Medium Watercolour and gouache on paper
  • Original dimensions Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki (inventory number A II 968:16)
  • Collection/Museum Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki (inventory number A II 968:16)Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki (inventory number A II 968:16)

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