'An angel girl is hurt' — why she is carried away, helpless, by two boys

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The angel cannot tend to herself.

Her eyes are closed. Her head is wrapped in bandages. Bloodstains mark her wings, which are as large as her body — look closely and you can see where something has torn at them. Her bare feet hang limp. In this state she is carried away, head bowed, the hem of a white cloth trailing in the dirt. Two boys hold up a stretcher, one at each end, and cross a muddy path. The boy in front is dressed entirely in black — hat, coat, trousers, shoes, all of it. His collar is high, his sleeves and hem long, making the darkness seem even deeper. The boy a step behind matches his pace and his somber look, with one difference: he holds his head up. Eyes open, he gazes out beyond the edge of the canvas. The background is as bleak as the angel and the two boys themselves. Fog hangs thick. What fills most of the space is an unfilled brown emptiness.

And yet — is not the angel a messenger of God?

Nothing about an angel and a desolate landscape belongs together. More to the point: should an angel be allowed to fall this helplessly ill? Is she not, by nature, a being who stands firm for good and faces evil without flinching? The longer one thinks about it, the deeper the confusion grows. The painter is Hugo Simberg; the work is titled "The Wounded Angel." What follows is an exploration of why he painted something that looks, on its face, so absurd. The conclusion, stated upfront: there is no single tidy interpretation. Only searching and guessing are possible.

In 1902, Simberg fell ill with what was believed to be meningitis. He had only just turned thirty.

The suffering was severe — for a time he spent most of each day in bed. The pain peaked through the winter before gradually easing. "The Wounded Angel" was the work Simberg completed the following year, shortly after shaking off the worst of the illness.

Could it be, then, that Simberg saw himself in the wounded angel?

Perhaps he projected his own worn-out state onto this figure. The setting in which the two boys carry the angel also carries weight. The location depicted is Eläintarha Park, surrounding Töölönlahti Bay in Helsinki, Finland — a place regarded as a refuge for the working class, and an area dotted with sanatoriums and charitable institutions. Most significantly, the Diakonissalaitos hospital, where Simberg sought treatment for his illness, stood nearby. At this point one might think the answer has already presented itself.

Yet this line of reasoning cannot resolve the most fundamental question.

Why, specifically, an angel? If Simberg had his own illness in mind, it would have been far more natural to paint a human figure. Without an answer to why the angel exists at all, the self-projection theory cannot complete the puzzle. What is more, Simberg had already been sketching the bones of "The Wounded Angel" before he fell ill with what was suspected to be meningitis. Earlier drafts show two small demons offering medicine to a sick angel, and a demon wheeling a weary angel in a handcart. The illness may well have shaped the work as it developed. Still, it cannot explain why an angel had to be there — that was decided from the outset. The angel was always an angel.

The search for an answer continues.

It is time to move beyond analyzing a single painting and examine the painter's artistic vision as a whole.

Simberg was born in 1873 in Hamina, a port city in Finland.

His aunt Alexandra played a decisive role in drawing him toward art. She ran a private school and was an amateur painter herself — someone who taught him to read and write, and who freely shared with him the pleasures of art. In 1891, at eighteen, Simberg enrolled in the drawing school of the Viipuri Art Lovers' Association, where he learned the fundamentals. From 1893 he spent two years honing his skills at the Finnish Art Society's drawing school. As a student, Simberg appears to have stood apart from the mainstream. Even then, what interested him most was suggestion and metaphor set within unreal landscapes. He had little enthusiasm for what most painters around him still pursued — depicting the world as it literally appeared. He was not particularly sociable, and his health was never robust; he reportedly suffered various ailments, large and small, throughout his life.

It was during this period of self-imposed isolation that his aunt — the first great mentor of his life — opened another door for him.

She sent him a newspaper clipping, along with a note saying she wanted to give him the courage to set out on a new path.

The article was filled with writing about Symbolism — a style that placed the painter's inner life, insights and emotions above the depiction of outward scenery, and that channeled personal thought into symbols moving freely between the real and the unreal. It fit him like his own clothes.

In 1895, Simberg sought out Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a painter thirteen years his senior.

Gallen-Kallela lived in a log cabin he had built on the shores of Lake Ruovesi in Finland, a place he called Kalela. He was known above all for his deep command of Symbolism. Simberg became his student. The teacher's instruction ran along these lines: "Do not follow fashion. Listen to the voice within." Simberg moved between the quiet cabin and the still lakeshore, refining the world inside his head — pondering what he wanted to paint, what symbols he might use, and what messages he wished to convey. Along the way he read voraciously in mythology, legend and folklore. He also traveled when he could, visiting London, Paris and the Italian peninsula.

Exactly what proved decisive is impossible to say — Simberg was in particular reticent about such things — but at some point he appears to have stopped taking much of what lay before him for granted.

He seemed reluctant to draw hard lines between good and evil, the sacred and the profane, the strong and the weak.

In his view, the world held no absolute good and no unconditional evil. Even beliefs treated as truth had gaps in them, and even the most solid-seeming systems usually harbored extraordinary flaws. Nothing deserved the word "perfect." Simberg was a listener and a reader rather than a talker, an observer rather than a participant. He gave himself time to let things ripen. In that process, turning the world over slowly and carefully, he may have arrived at this understanding: whether the subject was an object or a symbol, the task was to paint the seemingly obvious as though it were not obvious at all. He was discovering what he was capable of painting.

A small, thin demon flounders before a hot cauldron.

He cannot manage the fire — he can barely manage the smoke. The adults nearby look at him with pity rather than fear; two horns and a long tail inspire no dread at all. This is Simberg's "Devil at the Cauldron."

A similar painting follows. This time the demon begs. He clutches two starving baby demons to his chest and pleads for food and drink — wretched and haggard as ever. The farmwife standing before him responds not with fear but with a look of sorrow. This is "The Farmer's Wife and the Poor Devil."

Demons are generally understood as symbols of absolute evil, beings that oppose God and urge destruction.

It was taken for granted that they would be depicted as enormous and powerful, cunning and cruel. Simberg upended even that "dignified" demon. Why should every demon be doing well? Among demons too, one imagines, there are individuals — or whole classes — who fail repeatedly, who struggle not with ruin and corruption but simply with getting through the day. Simberg also drew on "Piru," a demon from Finnish mythology, when painting his demonic figures. Piru is mischievous in the way a demon should be, yet naive enough to be tricked and bested by ordinary humans — another being that shatters received wisdom, and one Simberg could not help but find compelling.

Simberg also refused to paint death in the expected way.

Skeletons tend flowers. The blooms are varied — different colors, different sizes. A skeleton cradles one that pleases it, waters another for fear it may be thirsty, crouches down to check whether a stem is broken. The skeletons here look happy. The flowers in their bony care stretch their stems without worry. The air is mild. The space is orderly. And yet the title is "The Garden of Death."

Simberg, who rarely spoke about his own work, made an exception for this painting and added that explanation.

In that light, the skeletons are not death figures but companions of life — gardeners who tend the spirit-inhabited plants with care before sending them on to heaven. A skeleton draped in a black cloak is usually read as a symbol of evil, a creature that descends on humans or villages with a pale scythe. Simberg refused to follow that convention either.

Even a demon can be a wretch. Even the afterworld where skeletons roam can, surprisingly, be a gentle place.

Simberg's upended paintings carry a strange sense of liberation. They break apart received wisdom — or rather, the assumptions that have quietly hardened into received wisdom. The easy-to-forget truth that nothing anywhere is simply a given. In a society made up of all kinds of people, that truth settles naturally as a message of comfort. Did Simberg intend as much? What he sought to convey through fantasy and symbol, having glimpsed the world's absurdities — was it, ultimately, encouragement and solace for human beings?

At this point, return to "The Wounded Angel."

Even that magnificent angel is not exempt. She can be hurt. She can flinch from pain, and when things are hard she does not refuse help.

If even an angel is like this, how can a human being be expected to live every moment in strength and perfection?

Life and society seem to demand that we carry on flawlessly, as though that were simply natural. Even a brief mistake or moment of confusion is swiftly corrected. Yet everyone knows the truth: staying where you stand, without being pushed back, is hard enough — let alone getting ahead. Seen that way, the gaze of the boy who holds his head up seems to say something to the viewer beyond the canvas: *Are you greater than this being as white as snow? You are not — so set your burden down, just for a moment.*

The flower the angel holds is a snowdrop.

It is often read as a symbol of regeneration and resurrection. The angel clearly appears to be in pain — but she does not look as though she is dying or utterly destroyed. Given the setting already established, there is every reason to think she is being carried toward a place of treatment. It is all right to stop for a while. Recovery is possible. As long as she is not entirely extinguished, she can take flight again. When all the symbols in the painting are brought together, even this kind of reading becomes possible.

Is that not too subjective a reading?

Simberg is said to have spent five to six years or more conceiving and completing this painting — long enough for a newborn who can barely open its eyes to grow into a child commanding thousands of words. The work had that much time to ripen fully.

Simberg wrote those words to his younger sister shortly after hanging "The Wounded Angel" at the Ateneum's autumn exhibition. His teacher, Gallen-Kallela, read the painting not as a source of unease but as a message of healing and recovery. Many other artists, too, found themselves unable to leave the canvas. Responses ranged from the plainly literal — "an angel girl is hurt; that is all" — to sweeping interpretations such as "perhaps it represents a nation." Reactions were warm. Yet Simberg, characteristically, said little. When the work was first shown he left it without even a proper title, listing it simply as a dash (—). When asked what the painting meant, his answer was always much the same: *"The painting itself gives the answer. Everyone must find that answer for themselves."* So it is said.

Meanwhile, Simberg's enigmatic paintings sometimes stirred not just questions but outright controversy.

A year after completing "The Wounded Angel," Simberg was commissioned to decorate a cathedral then under construction in Tampere, Finland — the building known today as Tampere Cathedral. At the very top of the ceiling he painted a serpent: large, long, dull in tone, its mouth stretched wide as it moved to swallow what appeared to be the forbidden fruit. Even the background was red. It was as though Simberg, having upended his paintings, now wanted to upend the symbolism of a place itself — as if to say that even the most sacred space cannot be perfect, and that evil may therefore take root within it, so be aware. The attempt provoked fierce resistance. The supervisory committee's approval is said to have passed by a single vote.

Simberg lived not only as a painter but also as an educator.

From around 1907 he taught for nearly six years at the Finnish Art Society's drawing school, the same institution he had once attended. In 1910 he married a woman named Anni Bremer, and the couple soon had two children. Simberg died in 1917 at only forty-four — a sudden end at a time when he still had much left to give. Helena Ruuska, who wrote his biography, speculated that he had likely suffered for many years from an illness that may have been syphilis. Simberg was gone, but the paintings he left behind continued to draw attention. Analysis bred new analysis; interpretation pulled forth further interpretation. His signature work, The Wounded Angel, was voted Finland's "national painting" in a poll conducted by the Ateneum Art Museum in 2006. Even so, the painting still holds no definitive answer — and likely never will. Some art is all the more compelling for that.

A final note: here is the assessment of "The Wounded Angel" left by Sakari Saarikivi, a former director of the Ateneum who also wrote his doctoral dissertation on Simberg. *"What was bad has already been left behind. A time of reconciliation and peace is arriving. ( … ) A quiet reverence will light the future once more."*

Ruuska, Helena. Hugo Simberg: pirut ja enkelit, Werner Soderstrom.

Saarikivi, S. Hugo Simberg — elama ja tuotanto, WSOY.

"Hugo Simberg," Artist Register, Artists' Association of Finland.