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| In the 1880s Akseli Gallen-Kallela made his debut in the Finnish art world like Kullervo, the contradictory and wild figure of the "Kalevala", Finland's national epic. Contemporaries wrote of him as "innately gifted, wild and brusque like the tiny Kullervo tearing asunder his swaddling clothes". With his realistic and uncompromising depictions of the common people, Gallen-Kallela soon attracted a great deal of attention.
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 Between 1884 and 1889 Akseli Gallen-Kallela studied in Paris. He painted scenes from bohemian life in Paris, cafés, studios and his artist friends, but gradually authentic Finnish nature, its wilderness tracts and their inhabitants began to attract him. Gallen-Kallela also began to be fascinated more and more by the world of the "Kalevala". He wished to capture in his works the nations and its mythical heroes.
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| "I can always reach the point where my country will be content with my achievements, but my ambition reaches much farther! Everything or nothing, first or last. That is the motto I want to keep for the rest of my life."
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 Upon returning to Finland from Paris in 1889 Gallen-Kallela devoted his efforts to themes from the Kalevala. He married Mary Slöör in 1890, and the young couple travelled on their honeymoon to Eastern Finland and Karelia, where Akseli gathered material for his Kalevala paintings - in the same regions where the folk poems themselves had been collected. They became the best-known of Gallen-Kallela's works, representing in the minds of Finns the archetypes of the heroes of the Kalevala. Around the turn of the century, Gallen-Kallela made a significant contribution to the struggle against the Russianization of Finland by creating art of a national character that demonstrated the vitality of our culture and the right of Finland to exist as a nation.
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