Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865 – 1931) : Tuonelan joella (By the River of Tuonela) (1903), Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki.
Tuonela, in Finnish folklore, is a place where you go after you are dead. Its not hell, nor it is a heaven. We all have to go there. It is on north, its dark and somber place where the dead wonder as spectres or ghosts. However, eternal prison it is not, we can come back if we like, such as to protect our beloved or posterity.
Even so, dead you are, and remain as a shadow. In this painting we can see the mere desperation on the eyes of deceased, as they wait their turn to cross the river that separates Tuonela from our world. People of all ages. A young timid girl undresses with shyness, a young woman cries in desperation, covering her eyes, while older people submit to their fate that they knew will become someday. Woman on the boat cries for maybe last time ever, realizing when the boat starts to move that this is it, here I go. Man who is pushing the boat might be the very boatman who takes deceased across the river, a Finnish version of Charon if you like. He's eyes are focused and calm, like concentrating on he's work. Across the murky water of the river rises mossy rocky wall, Old, long time fallen snag of a pine lies next to it. On the left we see bloody red swan of Tuonela.
On the very right corner of the painting we see a man holding a mason's trowel, looking away. He's expression doesn't show any agony of the situation. This is Akseli-Gallen Kallela himself. He painted this work as a preparatory painting for frescoes of the mausoleum of Jusélius in Pori. Fritz Arthur Jusélius had lost her daughter Sigrid to a tuberculosis in 1898, when she was just 11-years old, and wanted to build a mausoleum to commemorate her memory. Gallen-Kallela was commissioned to paint the frescoes inside. Work included six frescoes where death among life was the leading motif. Painter himself has lost he's daughter Impi Marjatta in 1895 as a child. Thus the sorrow and anguish that Jusélius felt was very familiar to him. That was the force that made the very frescoes and their preparatoty works one of the best paintings he ever produced.
After all this sorrow and desperation we have to take a closer look on this painting, there might be a an important message to all of us. Just above the undressing girl we see a reddish face looking straight to us, breaking the fourth wall. He is an another painter Pekka Halonen (1865 – 1933), the second real person in this play. Then we take another look at Gallen-Kallela on the right. Is he on this painting or standing in front of a painting? What is clear that trowel he is holding is a symbol of freemasonry. Turn of the 20th century was an age of spiritualism and theosophy. Concepts that changed the very perspective on death. It stated that we don't die, we just change our form from physical to spiritual. Thus painters on this painting, Halonen and Gallen-Kallela, other looking to us, other looking away tells us with their indifference of depicted suffering, this is just a painting, this is not real, there is no death!
