Art and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Finland : A Study of Akseli Gallén-Kallela’s Art

This thesis explores how national identification is represented in nineteenth-century Finnish artworks. More specifically, it focuses on the paintings of Akseli Gallén-Kallela. Akseli Gallén-Kallela was an active artist who devoted himself to constructing and disseminating the notions of a “Finnish” and “Finnish nation”. The main objective of this study is to understand how Gallén-Kallela managed to construct and circulate the ideas of nation and national identification in his paintings. My theoretical framework is based on Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolistic approach and W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion of “landscape as a cultural medium”. The former insists that each nation has an ethnic core that not only provides cultural conformity but also a lasting sense of continuity. It advocates a study of ethnie and nation from a visual analytic perspective. The latter claims that landscape also serves as a cultural practice that helps the formation of social subjects. The main finding of this study is that Gallén-Kallela managed to create a Finnish ethnoscape, that is, a landscape attached with Finnish physical characters and spiritual qualities. Moreover, by authenticating his experience of nature and rural life, Gallén-Kallela attempted to represent and promote what he believed to be nationally unique and valuable for Finnish people. He attempted to translate the abstract notion of nation and identity into something tangible and accessible to common people. Gallén-Kallela’s love for his homeland and his rural friends became the initial inspiration of his artistry. His work is a complex of ethnos and wilderness. They contain power to raise one’s sentiment and sympathy. The artist himself, as an artist and cultural communicator, managed to paint down and promote Finnish ethnic distinctiveness with his profound love and loyalty to his homeland