The Wounded Angel

The facts recorded for this painting are few and firm. Hugo Simberg finished it in 1903, in oil on canvas, at 127 by 154 centimetres, and it is now in the Ateneum in Helsinki as part of the Finnish National Gallery, catalogued under the inventory number A II 1703. Almost everything else about it has to be got from looking.

What you see is a procession of three across open ground. In the middle, seated on a stretcher of poles and cloth, is a winged figure in a plain pale garment, barefoot, head bound with a bandage over the eyes, hands folded. Two boys in dark clothes carry the stretcher, one at each end. The ground is low and bare. There is water. The light is thin. Nobody else is present, and nothing in the setting says which country or century this is, though the landscape is austere in a northern way.

Simberg was a Symbolist, and it is worth being exact about what that label means rather than treating it as a mood. Symbolist painters of the late nineteenth century turned away from recording the visible world accurately and towards images meant to stand for inner states, beliefs and fears. The picture is not a report on an event; it is built to carry meaning. But Symbolism has a habit that makes it harder, not easier, to read: it frequently declines to supply the key. Simberg gives us a wounded angel, two children, a stretcher and a shore, and no legend that tells us who the angel is, what wounded it, or where the group is going.

So the painting works by withholding. We know an injury has occurred because we can see blood on a wing, and we know it has disabled the figure because otherwise there would be no stretcher. We do not see the injury happen, or the cause, or the destination. The bandage over the eyes deepens this: even the person at the centre of the event does not have the information we lack. Nobody in the picture is in a position to explain it. The two boys presumably know where they are heading, but their faces are set to the task rather than to any drama.

That blankness is why the picture holds up under long looking. A grieving crowd would tell you how to feel. Two children carrying something heavy across wet ground tell you almost nothing, and so the emotional work falls to the viewer. Some people read the painting as being about illness and recovery, some about lost faith, some about childhood confronting suffering. Simberg left no caption embedded in the image to settle it, and I would not pretend the matter is settled by scholarship either. The image is deliberately open, and reading it as a puzzle with one answer misses how it was made to function.

One more compositional decision deserves attention: the scale. At just over a metre and a half wide, this is a large picture for a scene with three figures and no incident. The size gives the empty ground and the low sky room to press in around the group. The effect is that the walk feels long. Whatever help the boys are taking the angel towards, it is not close.