60°10”N, 24°57”E
IMPERIAL ALEXANDER UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ANATOMY
PROFESSOR BONSDORFF’S SKELETON COLLECTION
Hilda Olson is concentrating on a vertebra.
She can feel the gazes on her neck, but shuts them out and focuses on examining the bone.
This will be different from her earlier work.
She is used to making the small larger, to increasing the size of her subject, until a spider reveals itself in all its beauty, but with this creature there is no need for a microscope.
No, now she has to reduce the size of her subject so much that the vertebra will fit onto a single sheet of paper, and she makes the appropriate calculations, searching for just the right scale.
The university’s drawing master leans over her work, and Olson nods politely, though the situation is distinctly odd.
She is used to drawing her subjects in the wild, in forests and meadows, first sketching the landscape before gently sliding the arthropods under the lenses of her microscope.
Today, however, she is not in the wetlands of Opukskii but in her anatomy professor’s study, surrounded by statues of Antiquity, renowned academics, and dark wood –and even if she can hear the rapid beating of her heart in her ears, she does not let her nerves show, but lowers her pencil to the paper and begins to draw.
The drawing master Magnus von Wright leans over her, carefully scrutinising the lines she sketches.
When Prof. von Nordmann started looking for an illustrator, he asked if he might find himself an assistant among the students at the drawing school, but to his disappointment von Wright could not recommend any of them.
They are students, future scientists that he is instructing in the art of seeing, but in the boys’ home schooling not enough attention is paid to the artistry of the hand.
As artists, they are hapless, unskilled, they step into the drawing hall without knowing how to prepare a canvas or make a stitch in leather, he has to teach them everything, even the most rudimentary skills.
If it were anyone else, he might have suggested one of the younger boys, still wet behind the ears, but not for von Nordmann, for he has seen the sketches this great man produced in his youth.
In the past, von Nordmann used to illustrate his own research, and his skill and precision were equal to that of even the deftest nature illustrators.
His paintings of fish garnered praise from all those who saw them, but the print run was small because the professor only used the most valuable paints in his illustrations.
The volume became so expensive that universities could not afford to acquire it for their libraries, but those who had seen the images lauded the professor’s skill.
His works were made all the more special by the fact that he painted the fish while they were alive.
A dead fish lies on the researcher’s slab, flat and lifeless, its fins retracted, though the very word animal means a creature that is animated!
It is a living, breathing thing, and he documented his fish as they moved and lived, though this entailed taking an aquarium everywhere he went.
In arduous terrain, the glass vessel had to be carried by his assistants, so that vibrations felt as the carriage’s wheels drove over stones and roots did not cause its fragile glass walls to crack.
Maintaining an aquarium in the wilderness required care, but when a fish plopped into its waters, von Nordmann forgot all the trouble involved.
Von Nordmann was the foremost nature illustrator of his day, but time has dimmed the lenses in his eyes.
Initially, he noticed that he needed a little more light while drawing and scheduled his work for the brightest hours of the day.
Whose eyes do not grow tired from time to time, staring at fish scales in the dusk?
But gradually the details began to evade him even in the brightest of lights, and his illustrations became sloppy.
One scale becomes smudged into the next, and before long he must admit the truth: he needs another pair of eyes to help him.
But where can he possibly find such an artist, someone with a mastery of observation who can also withstand the discomfort of research expeditions?
This is a problem indeed, and he asks his colleagues to spread the word: the professor of zoology and botany is looking for an assistant with excellent illustration skills.
He interviews a number of young men recommended to him, but none of them meets his requirements.
He cannot imagine spending weeks travelling with anyone who waxes lyrical about Darwin’s madcap theories or who out of sheer carelessness draws the wrong number of eyes on a lynx spider.
None of them is good enough, for none of them is Arthur.
His son was a promising illustrator. Arthur had a good eye for nature, its little idiosyncrasies and the minute differences between species, and though his greatest passion was for birds, he was an avid illustrator of beetles and harvestmen too.
With a little practice, he would have developed into an artist every bit as skilled as his father, perhaps even more so.
The professor looks at the canvas above his desk, Arthur’s painting of the Eurasian nuthatch.
He refuses to take it down, though every time he looks at it, it feels as though the world were about to run out of air.
Arthur had travelled to Siberia to conduct an investigation into the local birds.
Von Nordmann was waiting for a parcel containing his son’s drawings, perhaps revealing fascinating new discoveries, but instead a courier brought the most dreadful news to his door.
A silly, drunken argument over a gambling debt, and now his son is gone, murdered in a Siberian tavern.
He inspects the boys turning up at his study and cannot imagine any of them taking Arthur’s place.
He was about to give up, but then his luck took a turn for the better.
He was invited to dinner – a most tedious, inconsequential affair – and he’d even considered staying at home, spending the evening cataloguing the specimens that had found their way into the corners of his study, but his daughter forced him to attend.
It would do her dear father a world of good to spend time not just with insects and mosses but with members of his own species too.
He agreed, reluctantly, but Matilda’s commands proved fortuitous indeed, as at dinner he was seated next to none other than Zacharias Topelius, general secretary of the Finnish Art Society.
The professor bemoaned his situation to Topelius, complained of how difficult it was to find an assistant who knew how to hold a pencil and whose head had not been filled with nonsense.
To his great surprise, Topelius breaks into a smile: he knows just the right illustrator.
The Art Society’s competition recently gave a prize to a young lady with an exceptionally deft hand.
Miss Hilda Olson’s winning entry was such a detailed copy of Lofgren’s painting Girl with Flowers in Hand that the painter could not tell his own work from the copy, and to Topelius’s delight, he can vouch not only for Miss Olson’s skills but for her character too.
The Olson family used to spend their summers in the same area as the Topelius family, and Miss Olson herself used to play with his own children.
She was a quiet, serious child who never complained about wet petticoats if it started raining but thanked the Lord for taking care of her thirsty plants.
A woman for an assistant. A remarkable thought, though not entirely out of the question, and von Nordmann is happy to admit that in the art of illustration women’s work is often more precise and detailed than that of their male colleagues.
His daughters are all skilled with a pencil and paintbrush, and if the world were different, their gifts would have carried them into careers as nature illustrators just as Arthur’s should have done.
It wasn’t an altogether impossible thought.
Of course, the subjects of women’s paintings are often different to those of scientists, but if Miss Olson could paint children and flowers, there was nothing to suggest she could not turn her attention to insects too.
The botanical gardens in Helsinki can be a bleak, barren place on January mornings: the pathways lined with hesitant young trees, hay blackened by the winter jutting here and there through the snow.
Von Nordmann takes in the view in front of him and sighs.
Helsinki is certainly no Yalta, though Miss Olson does not appear to notice the Gardens’ modesty and studies the greenhouses most keenly.
The professor notes her demeanour. If the lady so wishes, we can visit the palm house, he begins, but only if you do not care too much for your attire: in the frozen weather, the gardeners have to keep a fire burning in the boiler rooms around the clock, lest the palms and vines shrivel and shed their leaves.
The hot smoke is then channelled into the palm house through a complex system of flues.
This ingenious system creates artificial tropical conditions within the glass walls, keeping the plants alive through the cold, dark winter months, but the system is not perfect.
The palms remain alive, but anyone visiting them must put up with the smoke, which makes one’s eyes sting and leaves an unpleasant smell on one’s clothes.
Olson glances at her simple skirt and laughs in amusement: she would be only too happy to see the palms.