As an artist, Tove wanted to make her painting such that the children of the school could find the details in the picture that they liked. The colors of the mural are brilliant and variegated, almost every detail differs in color, and yet the whole is harmonious and balanced, almost sleepy idyllic. Jansson has used closer to forty shades of color when painting the mural. The mural is 190 cm high and 360 cm wide and covers most of the back wall of the dining room and is made with a secco technique directly on the wall. The building then belonged to a Swedish-language elementary school. In Karjaa, Finland, Tove Jansson commissioned to decorate the dining room of the building designed by Hilding Ekelund. Read the full story in Finnish or Swedish here. The plaster has become detached in several places and according to historical data, the Moomin figure in the work may have dropped from the wall at some point due to damage to the lower part.īelow a story by art historian Solveig Eriksson. The painting on the canteen wall has suffered over the years, for example, due to canteen chairs and food splashes. The subject of the painting, the sailor, the lighthouse, and the mermaid shows how it used to be a canteen of the Maritime school. In 1952, A few years after the paintings at kindergarten in Kotka, Tove also painted a mural for the canteen now serving Etelä-Kymen Vocational College in Kotka. The former kindergarten premises now serves as office space for the administration of early childhood education in the city of Kotka and the works are not in public display. Large fairytale panoramas feature well-known Moomin characters as well as typical fairytale characters.

In 1949, Tove Jansson painted two murals for private kindergarten in Kotka, Finland. Fairytale murals for private kindergarten, 1949

Tove jansson art