Akseli Gallen-Kallela: En Saga (Jean Sibelius and Fantasy Landscape), 1894. Ainola Foundation. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Pakarinen

The year 2015 marks the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Jean Sibelius, with a host of events planned throughout Finland to celebrate the occasion. One of the first of these celebrations is the opening of an extensive jubilee exhibition in the Ateneum Art Museum that explores the composer’s contacts with the art scene of his day.

Sibelius and the World of Art will be open from the 17^th of October 2014 to the 12^th of April 2015. Through a variety of themes, the show explores Sibelius’s relationship with art, and with the artists of time, as well as the evolution of his public image from a young genius to the subject of the Sibelius Monument in the 1960s.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Ateneum Art Museum and the Ainola Foundation and includes a selection of works from Sibelius’s private art collection, which are usually on display in the composer’s home, Ainola.

Sibelius was an inspiration to many artists, and he himself was surrounded by art in many ways. At the beginning of the last century Sibelius was a member of the artistic community that developed on the eastern shore of Lake Tuusula, near Jarvenpää, living there alongside the painters Eero Järnefelt and Pekka Halonen, the artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt, the writer Juhani Aho, and the poet J. H. Erkko. Sibelius’ influence on Finnish art can be easily seen from his tone poem En Saga, completed in 1892, which inspired one of the country’s most influential artists, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, to paint a work with the same title two years later. In 1909, a trip to the Koli wilderness with his brother-in-law, Eero Järnefelt, gave Sibelius the inspiration for his fourth symphony, which he dedicated to the artist.

The themes of the exhibition are Sibelius’s Image, Youth, International Sibelius, Fantasy and Myth, Finlandia, Portrait Gallery, Into the Woods,Symphonic Landscapes, Melancholia, and The Sibelius Monument.