Paris In Paris, Schjerfbeck painted with Helena Westermarck, then left to study with
Léon Bonnat and Gustave Courtois at Mme Trélat de Vigny's studio; she later regarded Courtois as her most important teacher. The painting was later bought by the Finnish Art Society. During this period Schjerfbeck was painting in a naturalistic plein-air style.
Hyvinkää years In the 1890s Schjerfbeck started teaching regularly in Finland at the Art Society drawing school, now the
Academy of Fine Arts.
Hilda Flodin was one of her students. However, in 1901 she became too ill to teach and in 1902 she resigned from her post. On her doctor's advice she moved with her mother to
Hyvinkää, whose dry climate was considered healthy, and where she would remain for the next two decades. While living in Hyvinkää, she continued to paint and exhibit. Cut off from the Helsinki art world, her main contact with contemporary art came through magazines and books sent by friends. Schjerfbeck also took up hobbies such as reading and embroidery. During this time Schjerfbeck produced
still lifes and landscape paintings, as well as portraits, such as that of her mother, local school girls and women workers, and also self-portraits, and she became a
modernist painter. Her work has been compared to that of artists such as
James McNeill Whistler and
Edvard Munch, but from 1905 her paintings took on a character that was hers alone. She continued experimenting with various techniques such as using different types of
underpainting.
Exhibitions In 1913 Schjerfbeck was sought out by the art dealer , who became convinced of her work's quality and set about making her better known. Through his encouragement she exhibited at
Malmö in 1914,
Stockholm in 1916 and
St Petersburg in 1917. In 1917 Stenman organised her first solo exhibition. That same year,
Einar Reuter — a forest officer and art enthusiast who had befriended Schjerfbeck in Hyvinkää — published the first monograph on her work under the pseudonym H. Ahtela. Later she exhibited at Copenhagen (1919), Gothenburg (1923) and Stockholm (1934). In 1937 Stenman organised another solo exhibition for her in Stockholm, and in 1938 he began paying her a monthly stipend. Her paintings were successfully displayed in several exhibitions in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s. A large retrospective planned for the United States in 1939 had to be cancelled owing to the outbreak of war. In 1942, on the occasion of Schjerfbeck's 80th birthday, Stenman organised a major tribute exhibition in Stockholm. == Later years and death ==