Spot the Moomin! Jansson's murals on show for first time

However, ahead of next year's 80th anniversary of one of the most beloved sets of literary characters ever created for children, Jansson's home town, Helsinki, is shifting the spotlight away from those easy-to-draw spherical shapes to more complex work by the artist.

- Philip Oltermann

Among them are intricate panoramas drawn in charcoal on tracing paper, oil-painted vignettes rendered on glass, and monumental landscapes lavished on plaster walls.

The exhibition, entitled Paradise, at the Helsinki Art Museum focuses for the first time on the murals and frescoes Jansson was commissioned to paint on the walls of factory canteens, hospitals and even churches - long before Moominmania conquered the world and the adventures of Snufkin, Snork Maiden and Little My became a Finnish secular religion.

"By the end of her life, Tove was most famous as a writer," said the artist and author's niece, Sophia Jansson, now president of the board of the company that manages her copyright. "But she always saw herself first and foremost as a painter. It was only later that her reputation as the 'Moomin woman' overtook her."

Jansson, who died in 2001, produced books, plays, set designs, puppets and songs. In recent years, her oil paintings have been the subject of increasing interest to collectors, with one still life fetching €383,800 (£320,000) at an auction in Helsinki in 2023.

Yet her public work has long been overlooked, in part because her commissioned pieces were considered separate from her artistic practice, and also because many have been destroyed or walled up. Sophia Jansson realised she "hadn't seen half of them" until the museum attempted to track down the remaining works.

The show includes five original murals and several competition paintings, as well as large photographic reproductions of works that couldn't be moved, and rolls of sketches for frescoes discovered only last year during an inventory of Jansson's studio.