Two Profiles

Who the two women are

Marianne Preindlsberger, born in 1855, was an Austrian painter who had studied for several years in Munich before coming to Paris. She and Schjerfbeck met at the Académie Colarossi in 1881, when Schjerfbeck was eighteen and had just moved there from Madame Trélat de Vigny's studio for women. Marja Lahelma's 2023 biography describes Preindlsberger as lively and strong-willed, caring toward her younger friend, and inclined to find Helene timid and impractical. The two stayed close until Preindlsberger's death in 1927.

In 1884 Preindlsberger married the British landscape painter Adrian Scott Stokes and moved to England, where she painted as Marianne Stokes. In 1887 she persuaded Schjerfbeck to join them at the artists' colony at St Ives in Cornwall, where Schjerfbeck painted The Convalescent.

The museum's title names only the woman in front. Lahelma writes that the second profile probably belongs to Annie Anker, a Norwegian painter born in 1851 who had moved with Schjerfbeck from Madame Trélat's school to Colarossi's. Anker painted her own small studio scene in 1881 of Schjerfbeck and Helena Westermarck at work side by side at the academy. She died in 1885.

Painted in the studio, probably at work

Marianne Preindlsberger and the woman behind her look at something outside the picture. Lahelma reads the panel as having been painted while all three artists were working together in the studio, with the two sitters concentrating on their own easels rather than posing.

She places it in a type the art historian Carina Rech calls the friendship image, in which a woman artist's friend serves as her model. Such pictures, Rech argues, gained currency in the 1880s as women moved from amateur to professional status, and they show artists at work in a way that reads as professional and independent while staying respectable. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2026 essay on Schjerfbeck by Patricia G. Berman makes the same point, calling the panel emblematic of the working life these women shared.

That shared life was the point of Paris. At Colarossi the women students were taught by Gustave Courtois and visited by leading Naturalist painters, though Westermarck later recalled that the students learned most from their more advanced peers. Schjerfbeck came to call Westermarck, Maria Wiik and Ada Thilén her sisters of the brush.

Concarneau, the summer after

In the summer of 1881 Schjerfbeck and Preindlsberger left Paris for Concarneau, a fishing port on the Breton coast, and stayed from July to September. The American novelist Blanche Willis Howard was there the same summer and put the colony into her 1884 novel Guenn, where Preindlsberger appears as a Danish art student and Adrian Stokes as an amiable young English landscape painter.

Back in Paris that autumn, Schjerfbeck gave up her lodgings with the Runeberg family and moved with Preindlsberger into a run-down boarding house in Montparnasse. In July 1883 the two went back to Brittany with Maria Wiik, to Pont-Aven, where Schjerfbeck painted The Door.

From a private collection to the Ateneum

The Finnish National Gallery's exhibition history for the panel begins in February 1924, at the Artists' Guild jubilee exhibition in the Ateneum, and continues at Liljevalchs in Stockholm in 1934. It belonged to the collectors Gerda and Salomo Wuorio, and the Finnish National Gallery's record dates its arrival as a bequest, with their collection, to 30 November 1965. Its inventory number is A IV 3650.

It has since traveled to the Phillips Collection in Washington and the National Academy of Design in New York in 1992. In 2019 it went to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and then to the Ateneum's Through My Travels I Found Myself. In 2021 to 2022 it was at Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde in Stockholm.

Where it is

The Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki, part of the Finnish National Gallery, in the Gerda and Salomo Wuorio Collection, inventory number A IV 3650. The museum's online record does not say whether the panel is currently on view, so check before traveling to see it.

The Finnish National Gallery releases its photographs of works whose copyright has expired under the CC0 licence, and its record for Two Profiles carries the museum's photograph on those terms.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

A panel 22 by 34 centimeters, painted in oil on wood. Close views show how differently the two heads are finished, the thick white of the front collar, the cracked blue of the dress behind, and the orange-red initials in the corner.