Portrait

Esteri (Essi) Renvall was a notable Finnish portrait artist, often considered ahead of her time as a pioneering sculptor. A contributing factor to her success was her willingness to experiment with different new techniques within the fields of patination, gilding, and painting, often using gold leaf and bright colours as a way of creating lively works characterised by fine details. Even though Renvall favoured bronze as a material, she also executed works in marble or plaster, as well as being an accomplished painter.

Renvall began her career by sculpting children’s portrait heads, popular among wealthy bourgeois families, and held her first solo exhibition in Helsinki in 1942. The popularity of the exhibition would render her a large and prestigious commission when the Werner Söderström Ltd Literary Foundation (later WSOY Literary Foundation), an independent non-profit foundation with the purpose to promote Finnish literature by awarding grants, prizes, and residencies in Finland as well as overseas, invited her to create a series of author portraits and medals (the Foundation owns and maintains an art collection consisting of works relating to literature and authors). The commission elevated Renvall to the status of a socially respected sculptor and a noteworthy artist alongside her male colleagues (who by that time dominated the local art scene). In all, Renvall immortalised a total of about 30 authors, like Helvi Hämäläinen (marble, 1942) and Saima Harmaja (bronze, 1943).

During her career, Renvall created over 5,000 portrait heads, with a peak in her production in the 1940s and 1950s, when she was considered one of the leading names in portrait art and, as mentioned above, received her most substantial commissions.

Renvall mastered classical, clean-lined sculpture, but from the very beginning of her career, she brought her own expressive, sometimes even rough, touch to her portraits. She could emphasise the facial features she wanted to highlight, leave visible traces of her modelling, add iron wire to bronze, for example, or play with open and closed forms.

As her career progressed and she developed as a sculptor, the importance of colour became more central, coming to the fore in 1951, after the artist’s trip to Egypt, where she travelled extensively. Renvall began to ‘dress’ her portraits not only with various patinas but also with colours, gold leaf, and silver. Renvall famously also incorporated small details such as pearls, jewellery, and metal into her sculptures. The artist remained steadfast in her vision, even though some critics were not always convinced by her decorative style.

Renvall, who never took to abstract expressionism, was a highly regarded sculptor in her day, but like other visual artists back then, her work was eventually overshadowed by the wave of modernist sculpture that swept Finland in the 1960s. Through her example, however, she paved the way for future generations of female sculptors such as Eila Hiltunen (1922–2003, Finnish sculptor famous for the 1967 Sibelius Monument in Helsinki) and Laila Pullinen (1933-2015, Finnish sculptor whose work exemplifies modernism, in particular classical modernism in sculpture).

Despite being the creator of popular public sculptures as well as an award-winning and active artist, surprisingly little research has been devoted to Renvall over the years. Her output has not been fully catalogued, and the majority of her portraits are, unsurprisingly, located in private homes. An important contribution to the general knowledge of Renvall’s life and work came in the form of the recent extensive retrospective, Essi Renvall - Ihmisyyttä etsimässä / Essi Renvall - In Search of Humanity, which was shown at Oulu Museum of Art, Oulu, Finland (2016) and Tampere Art Museum, Tampere, Finland (2016-2017), bringing together some 250 pieces, including sculptures, medals, drawings, artefacts, and photographs.

Renvall's works on paper are fairly scarce, with one exception being her 1948 Self-Portrait in the Finnish National Gallery Collection / Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki.To this could now also be added Portrait in the Firestorm Foundation.

Signed: ‘Essi Renvall’.

Provenance

Bukowskis, Online Sale, 25 November 2021, lot 1360683.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation