Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki on 9 August 1914 and died on 27 June 2001. The pictures treat a figure as a calm ink line. The body is round. The snout is short. The face stays quiet. Her father, Viktor Jansson, was a sculptor, and her mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, an illustrator. She studied painting in Stockholm, at the Ateneum in Helsinki, and in Paris, and she went on painting after the Moomin drawings filled the studio.

In 1945 she wrote and illustrated The Moomins and the Great Flood, made during the wartime devastation of Helsinki and set in a warm, green valley. Comet in Moominland and Finn Family Moomintroll then established the series. The last Moomin novel, Moominvalley in November, came in 1970. By then the books had been translated into some 60 languages. The drawings are ink-line character designs, the same round figure from book to book. From Moominland Midwinter the stories grow quieter, and the figures meet that quiet with kindness. Three picture books sit beside the novels: The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My (1952), a forest told through cut-out pages; Who Will Comfort Toffle? (1960); and The Dangerous Journey (1977).

The same line went into the newspaper. In 1947 the periodical Ny Tid serialised Moomintroll and The End of the World. In September 1954 The Evening News in London began a daily Moomin strip, announced on billboards across the city. The strips are clear in line, humorous, and often break out of the frame. They were published in 40 countries and reached more than 20 million readers. In 1959 she handed the daily strip to her brother Lars Jansson, who continued it until 1975. That comic work brought a crisper edge to the later book drawings, still the same calm figure. In 1941 Sweden had named her the most humorous drawer in the Nordic countries, for the cartoons she signed in the magazine Garm.

She illustrated the 1960s Swedish editions of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Murals of hers are in Helsinki, Hamina, and Kotka, and paintings are held by the Helsinki Art Museum. For adult readers she wrote Sculptor's Daughter (1968) and The Summer Book (1972), then Fair Play. The Hans Christian Andersen Award came in 1966, for her contribution to children's literature, and the Swedish Academy Prize in 1994.

The original Moomin drawings are in Tampere, in a museum that opened in 2017. In 1986 she and the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä gave that collection to Tampere Art Museum. From 1944 her studio was the turret at Ullanlinnankatu 1 in Helsinki. Summers were spent on the island of Klovharun with Pietilä, whose etchings illustrate Notes from an Island.