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Jansson Tove
(1914—2001)
The Moomin books

Writer, painter and illustrator. Studied painting and drawing in Stockholm 1930-1933, Helsinki 1934-1936 and Paris 1938. Public works of art include frescoes for the City of Helsinki 1947, mural for the Kotka vocational school 1951, mural for Hamina town hall 1952, altarpiece for Teuva church 1954, mural for kindergarten in Pori 1984. Moomin books from 1945; subsequently translated into more than 30 languages. Decorations: Pro Finlandia medal 1976, H.C. Andersen Medal 1966; Swedish Academy prize 1972; Topelius Prize 1978; Finnish state prize for literature 1963, 1971, 1982; Helsinki Prize 1980; honorary title of professor 1995 etc.
We are aiming to establish the Moomin character alongside Donald Duck and Asterix,’ said the managing director of Moomin Characters Ltd in 1995. The Moomin boom has subsided slightly since the early 1990s, when a Japanese animated cartoon series made the Finnish troll figure known in a large part of the world, and the family firm of the creator of the Moomins, Tove Jansson, began to intensify its marketing, for example by selling, in Japan, a lunch-box with chopsticks decorated with Moomin figures. The Japanese, in particular, love the Moomins: the first Moomin series for television was made in Japan as early as 1972, and a million Moomin books have been sold there.
The troll received his first taste of international success in 1954, when the London Evening Standard began to publish a strip cartoon entitled Moomin, which was drawn by Tove Jansson and her brother Lars Jansson. It was syndicated and, at the height of its success, was read in 60 languages in the newspapers of 40 countries. A Moomin World built on a small Finnish island attracts 4,000 children each summer.
All this began with Tove Jansson’s amusingly illustrated Moomin books, originally written in Swedish, of which a total of 13 appeared between 1945 and 1977 and which have been translated into more than 30 languages. It is in the books that the Moomins are at their most original and finest: they encounter the catastrophes of the world and return happily to the idyllic Moomin Valley, whose inhabitants are characterised by mischief, a sensitive conscience and a tolerance of difference; as they grow up, they enter a more severe climate, try to adapt to uncertainty and ponder the problems of friendship, solitude and freedom.
Tove Jansson’s parents were artists whose bohemian life in their Helsinki studio and summers spent on a small island in the Gulf of Finland form the background to the Moomin books. The Moomin figure appeared for the first time in public as Tove Jansson’s emblem in an anti-Hitler cartoon which she published in the late 1930s, but it had been born earlier on the Janssons’ summer island: when someone wrote a phrase from Immanuel Kant on the wall of the outdoor lavatory, Jansson drew the Moomin figure next to it, with the caption: ‘Cant!’ ‘I have not wished to philosophise or educate anyone, but have amused principally myself with my stories,’ says Tove Jansson, who is also prominent as a painter and as a prose-writer.

Åland Islands, 2007, Painting of Tove Jansson

Finland, 1992, Moomin looking into River

Finland, 1992, Morra

Finland, 1992, Theatre performance on water

Finland, 1992, Moomin and inhabitants

Finland, 1994, Moomins

Finland, 1994, Snufkin

Finland, 1998, Moominpappa writing Play

Finland, 1998, Moominmamma

Finland, 1998, Too-ticky and Littly My

Finland, 1998, Moomin and Snork

Finland, 2000, Emma and Moomins