Tove Jansson, Beloved Creator of the Moomins, Painted the World as She Wanted to See It

In 1942, newly moved out of her family’s Helsinki apartment and living on her own, the Finnish artist Tove Jansson painted a self-portrait. She gave herself a cool confidence: steely gaze, striped brown coat, a lynx stole draped around her neck. “I look like a cat in my yellow fur,” she wrote to a friend. “I don’t know yet whether it’s good or bad, I simply paint.”

Jansson may not have been sure of the work’s quality at the time, but I am: It’s marvelous. Through her brilliant use of color, the focused look in her eyes, the subtle flowers in the background, and the swaggering outfit (the lynx stole was purchased while in a “reckless mood,” according to her biographer Boel Westin), Jansson channeled a clear point of view. On the cusp of 30 and with the Second World War raging around her, the young artist braced herself for what was ahead. She was watchful, a bit defiant, bold.

Tove Jansson, Lynx Boa, 1942. © Tove Jansson.© Moomin Characters.

What Jansson also didn’t know in 1942 was that in a few short years, she would reach a level of fame even she, ambitious as she was, couldn’t have imagined. Tove Jansson, after all, is the creator of the Moomins: the snow white, long-snouted, hippo-like creatures that have captivated millions around the world since they appeared in 1945’s The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first of nine Moomin children’s books that Jansson wrote and illustrated. Moominmamma, Moominpappa, Moomintroll, and their cast of fantastical friends have been the stars of spin-off books, comic strips, television shows, theme parks, plush toys, and even an opera.

And it’s not just that they’re cute. The Moomins are philosophical in a way that cuts through typical kids’ entertainment, which is why they have enchanted readers of all ages for generations. Like their creator, the Moomins are poets, delivering lessons on friendship, loneliness, loss, and acceptance. They might as well be the official mascots of Finland for how popular they are there, though their fame stretches far beyond the Nordic country. Jansson remains Finland’s most widely translated author; her books have been published in more than 60 languages.

Tove Jansson’s self-portait with the Moomins.© Moomin Characters.

Jansson, who died in 2001, was a prolific writer beyond the Moomin books. She kept journals; corresponded with family, friends, and fans (she received around 2,000 letters a year, to which she’d send handwritten responses); and she wrote five novels, a memoir, and dozens of short stories. Her first novel, The Summer Book, from 1972, is a spare but stunning meditation on living in the midst of grief, and has just been adapted into a film by Charlie McDowell, starring Glenn Close.

Jansson never stuck to just one thing, and defied expectations at every turn. She made political cartoons, sets for the stage, and took on myriad public art projects. She was also gay—Jansson and her lifelong partner, fellow artist Tuulikki Pietilä, got together in the mid-1950s, some 15 years before same-sex relationships were decriminalized in Finland. “She had an incredibly strong drive to express herself all the time, in varying types of art forms,” says her niece Sophia Jansson, board chair of Moomin Characters, the company that oversees Tove Jansson’s copyright.

But there was one form of artistic expression that ruled them all: “She always saw herself as a painter foremost,” Sophia says. And quite the painter she was, as evidenced by “Tove Jansson – Paradise,” an exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum that opened in late October. “Paradise” brings together more than 180 of her artworks, including early self-portraits (standouts include Smoking Girl Self-Portrait and Before the Masquerade, in addition to Lynx Boa) and large-scale frescoes and murals. Never before has such a span of Jansson’s painted works been displayed together.

Tove Jansson, Smoking Girl Self-Portrait, 1940. © Moomin Characters.

Tove Jansson, Before the Masquerade, 1943.

On view at HAM through April 2025, this expansive show is one of many initiatives tied to the 80th anniversary of the first Moomin book. There are partnerships with Barnes & Noble and Urban Outfitters, both aimed at introducing the characters to an American audience that has not yet caught on to Moomin fever, and fashion collaborations with Acne Studios and the designer Tao Kurihara for Tao by Comme des Garçons. Finnish design powerhouse Artek will launch a collaboration with Moomin Characters next year as well.

While a few early Moomins do pop up in the works on view at HAM, the focus is very much on Jansson as a world-class painter. “Tove is a very special artist to us,” says Arja Miller, HAM’s director. The paintings tell Jansson’s life story: They channel both the artist’s private inner world and the collective one around her, striking her signature balance between whimsy and meticulous effort.

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki in 1914 to an artistic family, part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. She was close with her mother, Signe Hammarsten, a.k.a. Ham, who hailed from Stockholm and was herself a prolific illustrator. (Ham designed the most Finnish postage stamps of probably anyone, I’m told.) Tove’s father, Viktor Jansson, a.k.a. Faffan, was a sculptor who encouraged his daughter’s artistic career early on. Tove had two younger brothers, Per Olov, a photographer, and Lars, an artist who would go on to contribute to the Moomin-verse.

Jansson was educated at several art schools, and had strong opinions about all of them. From ages 16 to 19, she attended the Stockholm Technical School, where her mother had studied. She excelled there, but felt a pull toward home. She went on to the Finnish Society of Art in Helsinki, known as the Ateneum, the alma mater of her father, for the next few years—though she was continuously dropping out and returning.

In 1938, at age 23, Jansson traveled to Paris, the city where her parents met and had lived as young artists themselves. “Paris was her favorite city,” says Heli Harni, the curator of the show at HAM. In France she fell in love with the Old Masters and the Impressionists. The work of Matisse and Suzanne Valadon were particularly influential.

She studied art in Paris, too, trying on three different schools: the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts (Jansson’s assessment: “They painted in brown…. I could never understand why a background of dirty Pilsner-brown shouldn’t be painted a little more attractively on one’s own canvas. That’s why I followed my own path.”), then Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and, finally, her favorite, Atelier d’Adrian Holy, a less revered school but one that offered her more freedom. After Paris, she traveled through Germany and Italy seeking further inspiration. But World War II was looming, and she returned home to Helsinki.

Tove Jansson, Family, 1942.

In Family, an incredible work from 1942 that’s included at HAM, Jansson uses her own familial unit to depict the psychological toll of war on a household. Per Olov, in his military uniform, and Lars sit at a table with a game of chess between them (the pieces are red and white, metaphors for the two sides of Finland’s 1918 civil war). Ham holds a cigarette, her concerned eyes directed toward her husband. Faffan, wearing an artist’s smock, looks weary. Though the family was tight-knit, a giant rift emerged during the war years. Faffan was an anti-communist and a supporter of Nazi Germany, as some Finns at the time were, given Germany’s defense of Finland against the Soviet Union. (This rift is channeled in Jansson’s book The Exploits of Moominpappa.) Jansson, a staunch anti-fascist, paints herself standing behind her brothers, looking skeptical.

During this time Jansson and Ham were contributing anti-war illustrations to Garm, a satirical political paper. (“What I liked best was being beastly to Stalin and Hitler,” Jansson once said.) Old copies of Garm, on view at HAM, reveal that it was in those pages that Jansson first published an early Moomin-like character, which she called Snork.

After the war, Finland owed a lot in reparations, leaving the country broken, and broke. “Though there was little money, there was a desire by the authorities to commission public works, and somehow rebuild a lost identity,” Sophia, the niece, explains. Jansson entered and won competitions for public artworks and large murals in schools, banks, a church, even a power factory—many of them on view at HAM for the first time. She lent these works a cheerful, dreamlike style, incorporating natural settings and fairy-tale creatures. They are boldly, beautifully feminine, with a dash of humor—what Jansson thought society needed as it recovered.

Tove Jansson, Fairy tale panorama (left side), 1949. Commissioned work for the wall of the daycare center of the port company Ab Federation Stevedoring Ltd (now Kotka city’s early childhood education facility). City of Kotka. © Moomin Characters Oy Ltd. Photo: HAM / Maija Toivanen.

“Men wanted to have these jobs also, and they were very jealous of her at the time. She needed to show the whole world that she could do it, and she really succeeded,” says Harni, who also included in the show several large preparatory drawings that were recently found in Jansson’s old studio, giving a peek into the artist’s process.

Perhaps part of Jansson’s success in getting these 1950s commissions was the reputation she had earned from two stunning frescoes she made for a restaurant in Helsinki’s city hall in 1947—Party in the Countryside and Party in the City. “The deputy mayor had asked for some decorative vignettes for the space, but then Tove was so ambitious, she wanted to make these big frescoes,” Harni says. Jansson snuck in a reference to her first girlfriend, Vivica Bandler, in the city fresco. She’s dancing in a rose-patterned dress, while Tove sits at the table smoking.

By the mid-1950s, Jansson was a full-on celebrity. Beyond the Moomin books, which were already popular in Finland and Sweden, she was producing a daily comic strip for London’s Evening Standard. She felt pulled in the Moomin direction, leaving less time for painting (to her chagrin). But she created, in some form or another, all throughout her life.

She did make fine art again, in 1975. She had gone to Paris with Pietilä, her partner, who had a scholarship there. “Tove went along and she was supposed to write, but then she didn’t really find the inspiration to write anything, so she painted,” recalls Sophia. “And those late paintings from 1975 are, to my mind, some of the most amazing ones, because she’s so free in the self-portrait. She called it the Ugly Portrait, and she paints herself as an old woman, sort of all slightly twisted…she’s not looking for the beauty. There’s a lot in that painting. It’s really done with incredibly fresh brushstrokes, and sort of freedom that—the viewer sees it.”

Tove Jansson, Ugly Self-Portait, 1975.Suomen Kansallisgalleria Finnish National Gallery.

That’s the best that art can do: It can grant us a sort of freedom as we navigate the world. In spending time with Tove Jansson’s art, in spaces where she lived, with her family, I got the sense that she was always after that kind liberated state, though she never lost her pragmatism, nor her sense that its pursuit was hard work. It’s what makes “Paradise” such a fitting name for this show. It’s just aspirational enough, because maybe we should want for the tiny joys that help us muddle through.

“Give me a picture, a longing to express something,” Jansson wrote in a note in 1960. “It doesn’t need to be much, but it must be something, a little pleasure, a little need.”

“Tove Jansson – Paradise” is on view at the Helsinki Art Museum through April 6, 2025.