150th Birthday of Akseli Gallen-Kallela

The Swan of Tuonela, the waves beneath symbolising the descent of the spirit. The issuing country abbreviation is visible at the right end of the horizontal waterline. Along the lower rim the artist's palette with the anniversary numerals; to the right of the palette, the mint mark. The artist's name "Akseli Gallen Kallela" runs along the ring of the coin below the horizon line.

In the last third of the 19th century, when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire, an art emerged in Helsinki and the forests of Karelia that would become the foundation of a national identity. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, born in Pori in 1865, is still regarded today as Finland's most important painter of national romanticism. His illustrations for the Kalevala — the Finnish national epic compiled by Elias Lönnrot from oral traditions — shaped the image the Finns formed of their own mythology. Works such as "The Aino Myth" or the multi-part Kalevala frescoes for the Finnish pavilion at the 1900 Paris World's Fair brought him international attention and became visual reference points of the Finnish cultural nation.

Gallen-Kallela worked across a broad spectrum: oil painting, frescoes, graphic art, textile design and architecture. His studio Kalela on Lake Ruovesi, which he designed and built himself from 1895 onwards, exemplifies his effort to unite art and nature, craft and high art — an idea also widespread in the European Art Nouveau movement of his time, though Gallen-Kallela consistently tied it to Finnish motifs and landscapes. The Swan of Tuonela, one of the central figures of the Kalevala's realm of the dead, is a recurring subject of his work and links his painting to Jean Sibelius, who transposed the same motif into his Lemminkäinen Suite. Finland honoured Akseli Gallen-Kallela on his 150th birthday in 2015 with a 2-euro commemorative coin.