Preface to the catalogue

The Akseli Gallen-Kallela catalogue raisonné project pursues research on Gallen-Kallela’s paintings with the aim of cataloguing all his known works. A catalogue raisonné is a comprehensive, annotated listing of an artist’s complete oeuvre or a limited collection organized by technique. This is the first such publication in Finland and amongst the first in the Nordic region. Its purpose is to make the research publicly available online for free.

In the catalogue, each painting has an individual page featuring an image of the work and basic cataloguing details such as title, dimensions, technique, date of completion, and information about signatures and other essential inscriptions. The catalogue includes information on provenance, work-specific cataloguing data on exhibition history and a bibliography. The catalogue details are not yet fully completed. For example, the work-specific bibliographical lists of several paintings are incomplete or missing altogether. For paintings in private collections, the only provenance information provided is that they belong to a private collection. For paintings in public collections, more comprehensive provenances are published, which in some cases can be traced back to the artist. However, a seamless chain of ownership is often impossible to reconstruct—gaps in the provenance of artworks are common.

The cataloguing system runs on the Navigating.art platform, which was developed with support from the Hasso Plattner Foundation. The cataloguing platform language is English. Digitized materials, when available, are hyperlinked in the catalogue raisonné. Read more about the catalogue raisonné’s content and sources on the “Guide” page.

The project follows the research practices compiled in the Authentication in Art (AiA) foundation’s publication, “Guidelines for Compiling a Catalogue Raisonné,” from 2014. Technical analysis has not been carried out for all paintings in the catalogue. The catalogue will be updated as new information on the artist and his oeuvre becomes available. Nordic Art Intelligence foundation reserves the right to make changes in the information included in the catalogue raisonné. Changes may also apply to the list of artworks. Read more about the foundation, catalogue raisonné research, and the Akseli Gallen-Kallela catalogue raisonné project at nordicartintelligence.org.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela: Lemminkäinen's Mother, 1897. Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. Photograph: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Pakarinen.