Maria Wiik

Maria Wiik made her public breakthrough with the genre portrait "Marietta", which was shown at the Paris Salon in 1880, a motif typical of the truth-seeking realism of the time. In the current "L 'oeuf cassé", the artist goes even further in the environmental description, as the motif also has a clear narrative content. Wiik's colleague and biographer, the artist Helena Westermarck, wrote the following about this particular work, "But in the autumn of 1881, the artist returned to Paris, where she rented a studio and settled for the autumn. The main result was the painting L'oeuf cassé, which depicts a playful little girl busy assembling crushed eggshells. The idea of the painting came to the painter one day when, as usual, she ate breakfast in her studio. After the meal saw her little model eagerly occupied with this strange problem. The painting was exhibited at the Salon in 1882. Here at home, it was never exhibited since it found a buyer from America when it was exhibited in Paris." (Westermarck, 1937, pp. 83-84).
"L 'oeuf cassé" is in many ways very representative of Maria Wiik's art. Although she remained childless, Wiik had a particular fondness for painting children. Several children's motifs by her are today included in the collections of the Finnish national museum, Ateneum. In general, Maria Wiik is now represented in most Finnish (and also several international) museums. She was also one of the artists that the prominent Finnish art collector Gösta Stenman was particularly interested in.