It’s 1917, and you’re Finnish. (Lucky you.) After six centuries of Swedish rule, and more than a hundred years as a grand duchy of Russia, your nation is finally on the brink of independence. To the south, Europe is tearing itself to bits in the First World War; to the east, there’s the Russian Revolution. Most of the art you’ve seen at this point is either second-rate or beats a patriotic drum—lakes and forests and scenes from the “Kalevala,” a national epic featuring some cosmic eggs and a drowned girl who turns into a fish. One afternoon, in the heart of Helsinki, you stumble into an art gallery and see a retrospective of a painter named Helene Schjerfbeck. It all feels familiar, but not. Here is a world where people read empty books in empty rooms, flesh is stretched tautly on the bone, and eyes are cold enough to freeze the light behind them. You’re not sure you like it, exactly. But of this much you’re certain: Finland has produced a modern painter.

The Helsinki exhibition drew around four thousand visitors, a record for the Finnish art world at the time. A local art historian, in his review, compared Schjerfbeck to Titian, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. Notice the scramble of names there: a Renaissance master, two very different Baroque titans, and a German composer. The art historian was grasping at straws. A century later, we still are. The subject of “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck,” in the Met’s Lehman Wing, is a portrait painter seemingly uninterested in people, an artist of the “golden age” of Finnish art who isn’t associated with its goldenness, and a modernist you’d have trouble finding in almost any history of modernism. That’s also what makes her work tantalizingly great.

“The Door” (1884).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Yehia Eweis

To become a famous Nordic painter, it helped to be born between 1860 and 1865. Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela all understood this; so did Schjerfbeck, who arrived in 1862. As a child, she fell down some stairs and broke her hip. The injury left her with a permanent limp, creating an open invitation for every art historian and critic to psychologize her paintings as disguised self-portraits of suffering. Her father, a downwardly mobile civil servant, gave her pencils, paper, and crayons as she convalesced, and what started as art therapy turned into a calling. From an early age, she was plied with scholarships, travel grants, prizes, and exhibition opportunities. When she turned eighteen, she took a steamboat to Paris.

The Met show opens in the eighteen-eighties, when naturalism flowered in Parisian art schools. To see Schjerfbeck in peak naturalist mode, look up “A Boy Feeding His Little Sister” (1881); then dart up to the second floor of the museum, where Jules Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc” (1879) is on display. Note the square, almost pixelated brushwork and earthy palette Schjerfbeck adopted from Bastien-Lepage, who taught at the academy where Schjerfbeck took classes. This coarse, descriptive mode of painting was being used by the Third Republic for nation-building, uniting the motley cultures of France with an easy-to-chew visual language of freshly plowed fields, restaurant kitchens, and medical laboratories. I mention the nation-building because it’s what made naturalism such an exportable style, especially for a country like Finland, which was rushing to consolidate its identity overnight. In theory, Schjerfbeck was supposed to be one of Finland’s soldiers—she was in France on the dime of the Art Society and the senate—but her commitments were always more artistic than ideological.

“Self-Portrait with Black Background” (1915).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Hannu Aaltonen

In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of naturalism through a fine mesh strainer until all that remains are skeletal forms and eerie compositional croppings, Schjerfbeck forces your eye toward an occluded or trivial detail. “The Door” shows a chapel interior with a closed door, a smudge of light, and no signs of life, except for the fact that the vanishing point is low enough to put us in the eyes of a child or a goat. In paintings, doors tend to function as little narrative machines, producing expectation or action. But Schjerfbeck’s is a narrative dead end. It’s as if she took one of Pieter Jansz. Saenredam’s empty church interiors and shook it until even the emptiness fell out.

What helped Schjerfbeck ascend from naturalism into the modernist ether might surprise you: Old Master paintings. In the eighteen-nineties, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence to reproduce famous pieces for its collection. While reverse engineering works by Velázquez, Holbein, and Fra Angelico, she started to revise her techniques, fiddling with tempera, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal, and roughing up her surfaces. Puvis de Chavannes, whom she’d met in Paris, had been imitating the faded and matte look of fresco. Schjerfbeck also liked the way Degas bleached his pastels to deaden their tone. By pushing against the varnished, slick look of academic painting, and sapping its color into a chalky haze, she could pierce the viewer with a feeling of antiquity and melancholic potency. Once the patina of fresco entered her work, it never left.

In 1902, Schjerfbeck and her mother, Olga, moved to a one-bedroom flat in Hyvinkää, a small rail hub about thirty-five miles from Helsinki. The rustlings of Post-Impressionism hadn’t made an impact on Schjerfbeck when she was in Paris, but suddenly Cézanne, Gauguin, and Whistler crashed into her work, partly thanks to French art magazines. In Schjerfbeck’s homemade modernism, subject, color, and space all tend toward the minimal. With Whistleresque pieces like “The Seamstress (The Working Woman),” from 1905, and the almost scary “The School Girl II (Girl in Black),” from 1908, her palette constricts to pale blacks, grays, whites, and tawny browns. Rounded shapes are flattened or approximated with broad planes, so that clothes aren’t worn by the figures so much as blocked on, like shadows. Schjerfbeck’s mature style doesn’t just use vague forms but rigorously militates against detail. Details can be chatty and overeager; they populate the eye with information, rather than allowing the mind to invent it. “Let us imply,” Schjerfbeck said.

By the time Schjerfbeck had her solo show in Helsinki in 1917, two men had joined her camp. One was Gösta Stenman, who served as Schjerfbeck’s gallerist and local champion; the other was Einar Reuter, a young forester and artist, who became her confidant and crush. “Einar Reuter (Study in Brown)” (1915-18), painted during the honeymoon phase of their friendship, shows how Schjerfbeck, at the height of her powers, chose to paint someone she admired. It’s bleaker than you would hope. Schjerfbeck uses the rough weave of the canvas to turn Reuter into a husk of himself, with an empty pair of brown eyes and a mangled ear. Don’t mistake the depressive air for his own. Schjerfbeck’s portraits are not about showing you a person’s appearance and essence but, rather, about taking them away. Her anti-portraits, at their best and most psychologically lacerating, remind you how painful it can be not to have access to another person’s inner life.

The major exception to Schjerfbeck’s downcast eyes and turned-away heads is her self-portraiture. I’ve kept it out of the picture until now because it seems to operate on a different time line, as if there were a small, hidden room that Schjerfbeck entered every decade or so, to find herself again. Of the forty-some self-portraits done between the eighteen-eighties and 1946, when she died, there are two remarkable clusters. The first set, from 1912 to 1915, shows Schjerfbeck in her fifties, her face milk white, her lips pinched and stern. In one from 1912, a few colored brushstrokes—gray-blue above the brow, icing pink on the cheeks, a flash of gold in the hair—threaten to burst the illusion of her face into dozens of little painted moments. It’s the kind of loose handiwork that would have made Velázquez jealous.

“The Tapestry” (1914-16).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Private Collection / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Per Myrehed

The second cluster, from 1944 to 1945, includes some of the most bone-chilling self-portraits in the history of painting—more so than anything Rembrandt, Goya, van Gogh, or Kollwitz attempted. At the age of eighty-two, in a final sprint of twenty pieces, Schjerfbeck painted herself as a putrefying corpse, with enucleated eyes and goblin ears. There are touches of Munch’s screamer, Daumier’s withering caricatures, and Géricault’s dissected bodies. But more jarring than any of this is the lack of humanity that Schjerfbeck perceives in herself. In one portrait after another, you see her skull emerge from a bed of living flesh. It’s the closest an artist has come to painting herself from beyond the grave.

The “silence” of the exhibition’s title, along with the depressive tenor of the show, plays handily into our penchant for Scandinavian noir and age-old stereotypes about the Finns as a bunch of cold, miserable forest dwellers on the edge of civilization. For all her cosmopolitanism, Schjerfbeck didn’t do much to dispel this. She was unapologetically chilly and, like Munch, cultivated her suffering. “Poor my life would be without the grief,” she said. I’d suggest that the real Finnish story here is that of an artist who painted freely, without being absorbed into the ho-hum progression of European modernism or Finnish nationalism, and yet was well supported by the state in her key years of artistic development. That might not sound like the most electrifying reason to celebrate a painter, but you’re unlikely to get one as daring, rangy, and brilliant as Schjerfbeck without it. America should take note. ♦