Ateneum

Stand on the paving stones of Railway Square and listen for a moment. Trams grind and chime around the corner, and suitcase wheels rattle toward the station. Gulls call from somewhere above the rooftops. Then turn toward the long, pale palace on the south side of the square. Four stone women hold up its central balcony on their heads. That calm building is the Ateneum, home to Finland's best-known collection of older art.

The name comes from Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and the arts. In ancient Greece, an athenaeum was a place of learning. The founders in Helsinki chose the word on purpose. They did not plan this building only as a gallery. They wanted a house for culture, where art would be taught, made, studied and shown, all under one roof.

The building opened in 1887, designed by the Finnish architect Theodor Höijer. At that time Finland was not an independent country. It was a Grand Duchy inside the Russian Empire, with its own laws and institutions but no state of its own. For Finns of that era, building a grand home for art was a way of saying something important. A small nation could have a culture worth a palace.

Look up at the facade, and take your time. The style is Neo-Renaissance, which means it borrows the symmetry, columns and ornament of Italian palaces from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Notice the four female figures beneath the balcony. They are caryatids, a type of carved column shaped like a woman, an idea taken from ancient Greek temples. Above them, sculpted portrait heads look out over the square. They honour great artists of the classical and Renaissance past.

Now look for the Latin words carved high on the front. They read: "Concordia res parvae crescunt." It translates roughly as "Through harmony, small things grow." Here is the first surprise for many visitors. That motto was a quiet political message. A small people, working together, could grow into something larger. Few passers-by stop to read it, but it explains much about why this building exists.

For its first decades, the Ateneum was crowded and noisy in a way a modern gallery is not. Art students sketched in its rooms. The Finnish Art Society showed its collection here. A school of applied arts trained designers and craftspeople. Painters who later became national heroes walked these same corridors as young students. Over the twentieth century, the schools moved out to new homes, and the building became the gallery we know today.

Today the Ateneum is part of the Finnish National Gallery. Its sister museums are Kiasma, for contemporary art, which stands a short walk away, and the Sinebrychoff Art Museum, for older European art. The Ateneum covers a key stretch of the story, roughly from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Above all, it holds the work of what Finns call their Golden Age of art.

That Golden Age took place around the turn of the twentieth century. Painters, composers and writers turned to Finnish forests, lakes and folk poetry for inspiration. A central source was the Kalevala, a collection of old Finnish oral poetry gathered in the nineteenth century. Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted its heroes and battles with fierce energy. Albert Edelfelt painted soft, careful scenes of everyday Finnish life. Inside, you can see how these artists helped a nation picture itself.

Look out for the works of Helene Schjerfbeck too. Her painting called The Convalescent shows a little girl wrapped in blankets, holding a small green sprig. It is quiet, tender, and full of early-spring light. Schjerfbeck kept painting for decades, and her later style became bold and pared-down. Her self-portraits in old age are some of the most direct and unflinching pictures you will see anywhere in Helsinki.

Then there is the painting many Finns hold closest. The Wounded Angel by Hugo Simberg shows two solemn boys carrying a girl angel on a stretcher. She wears a bandage over her eyes, and one wing hangs damaged. Simberg never fully explained its meaning, which keeps people guessing. In a public vote in 2006, Finns chose it as their national painting. Many visitors expect a battle scene or a grand landscape. Instead, the winner is this small, mysterious procession.

Here is the second surprise. The Ateneum holds a Van Gogh, a village street scene from Auvers-sur-Oise in France. The Finnish collection bought it in 1903, only a little over a decade after the artist's death. At that time, many major museums still ignored his work. That makes it one of the earliest Van Gogh purchases by any museum in the world. Small Helsinki, in this case, looked ahead of the great capitals.

The building has changed a great deal since 1887. A major renovation was completed in the early 1990s, bringing modern light and climate control into the old rooms. Inside, notice the grand staircase and the way the galleries open off it. Exhibitions rotate often, so the paintings on display can change between visits. If a favourite work is missing, it may be on loan or resting in storage.

Before you leave the square, turn around once more. Across from you stands Helsinki Central Station, with its granite giants holding glowing lamps. To the side stands the Finnish National Theatre. Together these buildings frame one of the city's great public rooms. Watch the travellers hurry past the Ateneum's carved front without looking up. You now know what those stone women are holding up — and what that quiet Latin motto is asking of the people below.