The Petit Palais in Paris is currently hosting a breathtaking exhibition dedicated to the Finnish painter Pekka Halonen, showcasing his extraordinary ability to capture the countless variations of snow on canvas. Running from November 4, 2025, through February 22, 2026, the exhibition titled "Pekka Halonen: A Hymn to Finland" features nearly one thousand paintings that document the artist's lifelong obsession with winter landscapes. Halonen, who lived from 1865 to 1933, developed a unique visual language that transforms the seemingly monochromatic subject of snow into a symphony of color, texture, and emotion. His canvases resonate with what critics describe as the "cottony, soft music of winter silence," inviting viewers to experience the profound tranquility of Finland's frozen wilderness.
What distinguishes Halonen from his contemporaries is his remarkable dedication to painting en plein air despite Finland's brutal subzero temperatures. The artist would venture into the forests surrounding his home and studio, Halosenniemi, often for hours at a time, with his boots sinking deep into the snowpack. This direct engagement with nature allowed him to observe subtle variations in light, shadow, and atmosphere that studio-bound painters could never achieve. In Finnish culture, snow holds special significance, with over fifty distinct terms to describe its different consistencies and states. Halonen's work visually translates this linguistic richness, depicting snow as powdery, heavy, frozen, icy, wet, plastered, crusted, creamy, and sticky across his vast body of work.
The exhibition traces Halonen's artistic evolution from the mid-1890s to the early 1930s, revealing how he absorbed and integrated various international movements while maintaining his authentic voice. His early works reflect naturalist tendencies, but he later embraced elements of Symbolism, Japonisme, Fauvism, and Neo-Impressionism. The influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which he encountered through Paul Gauguin in Paris, is particularly evident in paintings like "Snowy Juniper" (1917). These works feature invisible horizons, asymmetrical compositions, and vertical formats reminiscent of kakemono scrolls. By the 1910s, under the influence of Fauvism, Halonen's palette became more daring, incorporating vibrant blues, purples, pinks, and even oranges to capture the optical effects of light on snow.
Several masterpieces anchor the exhibition and demonstrate Halonen's technical mastery. "Forest in Winter, Kinahmi" (1923) transforms a scene from central-eastern Finland into an abstract fairy tale, with heavy snow loads bending tree branches into sculptural forms. The painting deploys an astonishing range of colors—roses, mauves, greens, blues, and grays—to create depth and atmosphere. "Snow-covered Rocks and Ice" (1911) depicts the view from Halonen's studio door, featuring a frozen waterfall rendered in transparent layers that reveal iron oxide's orange tint in the water. "Lynx Hunter" (1900), created for Finland's pavilion at the Paris Universal Exhibition, celebrates rural Finnish life during a period of Russian oppression, showing the resilience of traditional ways of living in harmony with harsh winters.
The exhibition's final rooms explore Halonen's fascination with seasonal transitions, particularly the spring thaw. Works like "Spring Thaw" (1895) and "Winter Landscape at Myllykylä" demonstrate his uncanny ability to render changing snow textures through subtle shifts in color temperature and brushwork. In these paintings, hard icy whites give way to softer, grayer tones as temperatures rise and daylight lengthens. The artist's skill in capturing reflections—a patch of blue sky on a torrent's surface, for instance—remains unmatched. Visitors leave the Petit Palais with a renewed appreciation for both Finland's natural beauty and one painter's singular devotion to transforming winter's silence into visual poetry that transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries.
