Magnus Enckell

Magnus Enckell ( born November 9, 1870 in Hamina, † November 27, 1925 in Stockholm, Sweden) was a Finnish painter.

Life and work

Magnus Enckell grew up as the youngest of six sons of pastors in the provincial town of Hamina on the south-eastern Finland.

Enckell broke the first Finnish painters with naturalism, as he was still dominant style in the years of his training in Helsinki from 1889 to 1891. From 1891 on he held for the first time in Paris, he was a pupil of Jules -Joseph Lefebvre and Jean -Joseph Benjamin -Constant at the Académie Julian. He was mainly influenced by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, was interested in the modern spiritualism at that time and took the ideas of literary symbolism. During a break in Brittany, he led two paintings in color economical, self-portrait and Breton woman. He was enthusiastic about the Renaissance and the idealistic and mystical ideas of Sâr Péladan, from which he received also the androgynous ideal of beauty of his works. His favorite subjects were boys and young men, in which he gave expression to his multi-faceted fascination of männlichern body; especially in his watercolors and drawings dominated the male nude Awakening he painted during his second stay in Paris in 1893, while he improved his style reduced composition and transparent colors even further.

1894 and 1895 visited Enckell Milan, Florence, Ravenna, Siena and Venice. These were years of a painful inner conflict, his works were an expression of the relationship between art and life. The spent years in Italy awarded his painting more color and himself a more optimistic attitude. In the early years of the 20th century, he temporarily developed a somewhat more colorful, more vivid painting, with post-impressionist influences. Example of this is the image sequence Bathing. Together with Verner Thomé and Ellen Thesleff Enckell founded the group September, in which painters who shared his beliefs found.

1907 Enckell awarded the contract for the altarpiece of the new cathedral in Tampere. The 10 m wide and almost 4 m high fresco shows in reduced color the resurrection, people of all races and nationalities rise from their graves and walk towards the sky. Remarkably, he managed at a central point represent themselves in a church two men shake hands in to go to the new, eternal life.

1925 Enckell died in Stockholm and was buried in his hometown.