Object of the Month – Helsinki University Museum Flame
Stories from collections
A female figure cast in plaster stands engrossed in the book she is holding in her left hand. In her right hand she has a pen for taking notes. The other side of her draped garment has fallen down her shoulder. Her hair has been curled at the front and tied up at the neck. Our object of the month is a sculpture known by its German title Wissenschaft (‘Science’). It depicts a woman standing in the contrapposto pose on a plinth, much like an ancient goddess.
Our object of the month is a portrait of Professor Anders Wilhelm Ingman by the German-born portraitist Bernhard Reinhold. A.W. Ingman (1819–1877) was Professor of Biblical Studies at the Imperial Alexander University from 1864 to 1877. He was not just a clergyman and theologian, but also a passionate advocate of the Finnish language. His skills in Finnish exceeded those of most of his colleagues at the University, and he was the first theology professor to lecture in Finnish at a time when Swedish remained the official language of teaching.
Continue reading “A.W. Ingman, pioneering advocate of Finnish”
In 2015 a painting thought to have been lost was discovered in a cellar space of the University of Helsinki: Helmi Biese’s An Old Pine. But who was the artist, and how did the painting end up in the cellar?
A handsome young man with curly hair stands in a corridor on the fourth floor of the University of Helsinki Main Building. He is naked and leaning his weight on one of his legs. His eyes are downcast and his expression is sombre and slightly melancholy. Is he Antinous?
Resusci Anne is resting in the collection facility of the Helsinki University Museum, protected by dust covers. Anne bears the likeness of a beautiful, youngish woman with golden blonde hair and a blue-and-white tracksuit. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is slightly open. The manikin, its carrying case and other equipment for practising resuscitation were donated to the University Museum by the museum committee of Pitkäniemi Hospital in 2012. Pitkäniemi, Finland’s fourth oldest psychiatric hospital, is still operational today.
Used for practising cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), Resusci Anne is a remarkably realistic looking manikin, developed by the Norwegians Åsmund Lærdal and Björn Lind and the Austrian Peter Safar. The manikin was first presented in 1961 at the First International Symposium on Resuscitation in Stavanger, Norway. The face of the manikin is based on L’Inconnue de la Seine, a plaster cast death mask of an unidentified woman reputedly drowned in the River Seine in the 19th century.
The University of Helsinki Art Room holds an impressive collection of drawings, but the identity of some of the artists is not known. The signatures, if any, may be unclear, and notes made on the drawings may sometimes be misleading.
As I was cataloguing the drawings in our database and conducting online searches to establish the identity of the artists, I came across a skilled drawing entitled Portrait of a Young Woman, which showed the profile of a woman, from a slightly downward angle, with her hair in a bun and wearing a check shirt. At the bottom of the paper was the name Onni Bäckström, while at the top were the initials F. A. followed by ‘April 93’. Based on what I saw, I immediately assumed that the artist was a male student called Onni Bäckström. The initials at the top were of the person who had approved the work: Fredrik Ahlstedt, a teacher at the Art Room.
