The poet of snow has come to Paris in winter. Finnish artist Pekka Halonen was known as the poet of snow – not for his poetry but for his paintings. Pekka Halonen (1865-1933) wasn’t merely interested in snowy scenes as motifs; rather, he saw snow as the spirit of silence
Outside Finland, his work hasn’t been as widely seen as that of other Nordic masters like Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Norwegian Edvard Munch. Yet Halonen’s work synthesized European modernism, French plein-air painting, and Asian influences with a devotion to his homeland and has been regarded as an important translator of Finnish culture and nature.
Titled “Un Hymne à la Finlande” (“An Anthem to Finland”), this is the first major retrospective in France devoted to Pekka Halonen, a central figure of Finland’s Golden Age of painting who drew “the land itself with a poet’s soul.” The exhibition will continue at the Petit Palais in Paris until 22 February 2026.
Born in Lapinlahti in eastern Finland, Halonen grew up in wild nature. After formative artistic training in Helsinki and in Paris from 1890, including a period studying with Paul Gauguin. He returned home in 1895 where he married musician Maija Makinen the same year. They had eight children. He built his wooden studio-house called Halosenniemi on the shores of Lake Tuusula where he lived, worked, and painted. There, surrounded by forests and long winters, he committed himself to painting rural life and the natural world he knew intimately.
He said in a 1932 interview for the newspaper Svenska Pressen, “My original source of inspiration is Nature. For thirty years, I have lived in the same place with the forest on my doorstep. I have often felt that I have the equivalent of the Louvre or the greatest treasures of the world within reach. All I have to do is venture into the forest to admire the most beautiful paintings possible, and in this, I need nothing more.”
Rather than dramatizing nature, he said, paraphrasing his ethos, “Art should not jar the nerves like sandpaper — it should produce a feeling of peace.” That peace comes through in his snowy fields and forest clearings, with light and atmosphere. In this way, Halonen’s landscapes are about reconnection to the natural world.
The collection of his works on display is immense, mostly of snow; vast and pristine with lots of winter white, representing silence and solitude. In their totality, Halonen was not simply painting winter; he was painting solitude as a creative force, focusing less on people and more on their environment.
Halonen’s nature scenes include pine woods, melting ice and snow-covered rock gardens; all imbued with a deep sense of belonging to a place. They are meditations on the beauty of an everyday landscape in Finland, and how the smallest natural details can hold the emotions of tradition and culture in the silence of snow.
Halonen said that snow absorbs sound, slows movement, and reduces the world to the essentials of light, shadow, and breath. He thought creative solitude was often misunderstood as isolation. Halonen’s paintings suggest that solitude can be fertile and generative as winter prepares the ground for spring. Snow covers, but it also protects. Beneath it, seeds rest and roots gather strength.
The words and images of the poet of snow may resonate with creatives. There are seasons when progress is in repose, or seems invisible, or when what we are doing feels small or unseen. Halonen’s snowfields are reassurances that unseen does not mean unimportant.
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