ELLEN FAVORIN. Beach in autumn, oil on canvas, signed “EF”.

Frame dimensions: 31 x 45 cm.
Image dimensions: 22 x 35 cm.

The auction's painting by Ellen Favorin shows her low-key and meticulously executed landscape painting. With her fondness for Finnish nature in the smaller format, she depicts here a serene shoreline where the glowing colour scheme of autumn in the trees meets the cool, mirror-shiny water surface.

With her technical prowess shows in the transitions between color field and light, where she builds up the depth of the image in an almost photographic way. Yet there is a poetic sensibility there, especially in the way she captures the soft hazy tones against the horizon. This work is close to the Lohjanjärvi motifs she painted in her last years, and exemplifies her ability to create a large space of the soul on a small scale.

Ellen Favorin (1853—1919) was a Finnish painter whose work revolved around the Nordic landscape — not in monumental format, but in delicate, detailed miniatures. Born in Kuorevesi in 1853 and active in several European art metropolises, she remained true to her experience of the shifts of Finnish nature. With a nuanced, often low-key expression, she created landscape images characterized by presence, light and topographical accuracy.

Favorin's educational trajectory was unusually extensive for a woman in 19th-century Finland. She studied in Helsinki, Stockholm, Munich, Düsseldorf and at the Académie Julian in Paris — as well as travelling on to Italy, Switzerland and Denmark. She thus belonged to the generation of women who were beginning to seriously establish themselves in international art life, despite contemporary criticism of her “too modest” style.

In addition to painting, Favorin also worked with landscape photography and participated with his photographic miniatures at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. She was an active exhibitor in Finland during the 1890s and was connected with the Önningeby colony on Åland, where several of her paintings were added.

Ellen Favorin lived her last years in the lojo together with her siblings. There she painted subjects from Lohjanjärvi, often with a sensitive and mood-bearing expression. Her life was tragically ended in a fire in her studio in 1919, in which even large parts of her artistic output were lost.