“I’ve been living … a great deal in my** **memories lately,” the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck wrote in 1937.

Hers was a nostalgia perhaps born from relief. That year, the success of Schjerfbeck’s second solo exhibition had won her a loyal gallerist and, at last, a steady income. At the age of 75, she was still busy painting, and her work was on view, not for the first time, in a major Parisian exhibition—this one bearing the ignominious title “The Women Artists of Europe.”

It was still two years before war would force Schjerfbeck out of home, and eventually out of country, and then into the hotel outside Stockholm where she would die of stomach cancer in 1946. For now, for the first time in centuries, Finland was free. Schjerfbeck, for her part, was flush, and despite the toll of decades spent teaching and caregiving, she found her place as the first female artist whose self-portrait graced the walls of the Finnish Art Society.…