LONDON.- Sotheby’s in London will offer one of the most important works by Finnish artist Albert Edelfelt to be rediscovered in recent times. Though recorded by Bertel Hintze in his Edelfelt monograph of 1944 and illustrated on the cover of volume three, La laitière has been unseen by the public since it was exhibited in Helsinki in 1892. The painting comes to the market from a French private collection, having remained in the same family for over 75 years. Estimated at £300,000-500,000, La laitière – an atmospheric evocation of archipelago life in Haiko, where the artist kept a summer house – will be offered in Sotheby’s sale of 19th Century European Paintings on 25 May 2016.

Claude Piening, Head of 19th Century European Paintings, Sotheby’s London, commented: “It is always thrilling when long-lost masterpieces such as this come to light. La laitière, hitherto known only from the 1892 black and white photo published in Hintze, was likely sold directly to a French collector soon after it was completed in 1889, at a time when Edelfelt was spending time between Paris (to where he had moved in 1874) and Finland. In other words, it may have remained in France for the last century, and its re-appearance on the market now is an exciting moment for Finnish art.”

Setting the scene on the archipelago of Haiko, near the artist’s hometown of Porvoo, east of Helsinki, Edelfelt chose a subject he knew well. The closely cropped composition, with its marked separation between the figure in the foreground and the activity of the busy port in the distance, shrouded in mist, evokes the plein-air painting of Edelfelt’s late friend Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose distinctive style influenced a generation of artists across Europe. In its fluid and Impressionistic execution, and especially in its beautiful depiction of the water, La laitière suggests the influence of Anders Zorn, the giant of Swedish art whom Edelfelt had befriended on Zorn’s move to Paris in 1888, and come to admire more than any other artist.

La laitière was painted in 1889 at the height of Edelfelt’s career when he had become recognised as Finland’s foremost painter. Edelfelt was the first Finnish artist to gain international renown in his own lifetime. Having honed his skills as a painter of historical subjects first at the Art Society in Helsinki and later in Antwerp, he moved to Paris in 1874, where the tenets of Impressionism and the plein-air naturalism of Lepage proved particularly compelling. This was a key period for the artist, particularly in France where he received the Légion d’Honneur following the triumphant reception of his famous portrait of Louis Pasteur at the Paris Salon of 1886 (now in the Musée d’Orsay). Edelfelt also spent the summer of 1889 in Finland painting a commission for Tsar Nicolas II, The Last Farewell, a subject closely comparable to La laitière.