From Teide to Tanger

In the year 2010 the city of Loimaa recieved a large art donation from Eino (1924–2010) and Meeri (1921–1996) Haapanen. From the mid 60’s onwards they collected art together, and the hobby deepened after Eino retired in 1987. Works were acquired mainly from Finnish auctions, but some were also acquired from France. One of the foreign acquisitions is Alexandre Dubuisson's (1805–1870) Coastal Landscape from the Bay of Biscay. It was purchased in October 1981 at the Paris Art Fair.
From Teide to Tangier takes us to distant lands, from the French coast through the Mediterranean to Tenerife. Many Finnish artists were educated in France, for example, but many of them later sought inspiration from further afield. One of them was Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931), whose work Construction Work on the Banks of the River Seine from 1909 dates back to the same year when the artist and his family moved to Africa for over a year. The journey began in Marseille, from where the family traveled by steamship via the Suez Canal to Mombasa and from there by rail to Nairobi.
Hugo Backmansson (1860–1953) was another Finn who travelled to Africa. Backmansson is known especially for his orientalism. He lived in Morocco, North Africa, for several years, and traveled extensively in the region with the social anthropologist Edward Westermarck (1862–1939). The Landscape of Tangier is from 1910.
The collection exhibition also features two works from the Finnish Artists' Association's deposit collection: St. Paul's Alps (1926) by Wilho Sjöström (1873–1944) and Yrjö Ollila's (1887–1932) A Partial Sketch for the Ceiling Painting ’The Mirror of Thalia’ in National Theatre, which became the artist's fate.