Ateneum Dishcloth The Luxembourg Gardens, Paris

One of Albert Edelfelt’s (1854-1905) largest paintings is in the Luxembourg Park in Paris. A dishcloth in the Luxembourg Park in Paris is a reproduction of this famous painting. It is a top-quality printed product that tourists can buy with them at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki. The museum shop offers a large selection of similar products made from artworks owned by the Finnish National Gallery. More Joy produces long-lasting and eventually completely compostable kitchen towels, i.e. dishcloths, for museums through license cooperation, thus supporting the museums’ operations financially. The museum gets its share of every product sold.

Edelfelt’s work, in Luxembourg Park in Paris, is a remarkable naturalistic outdoor painting that tells about the lives of the children of wealthy Parisian families at the end of the 19th century. The sun is shining in a summer Parisian park, where the children with their nurses and nurses have gathered. The figures in the foreground are in shadow, and they are painted with a little more detail than the children and women bathed in the background light. Edelfelt made a lot of outdoor sketches of the Luxembourg park theme. He painted the final work in his Parisian studio and partly also in Haiko, Finland, the family’s summer place.

The painting for the museum’s collections was bought in 1908 from a private estate. Ateneum’s collections include several works by Edelfelt.