Helene Schjerfbeck, who lived from 1862 to 1946, was a national treasure in her native Finland, and a visionary artist. She produced more than 1,000 paintings in her lifetime—portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and a sea of self-portraits. Schjerfbeck began drawing at age four, when she was bedridden with a broken hip and her father gave her pencils with which to occupy her time. The child proved to be precocious, and it cannot be said that being female held her back: Schjerfbeck’s teenage study was supported by many scholarships, one of them bringing her to Paris in 1881. Her painting of trees in Brittany, Shadow on the Wall, done when she was 21, shows ghostly browns and greens already moving toward modernism. Loved in the Nordic countries, but mostly unknown elsewhere, the art of Schjerfbeck comes to the Met—60 astonishing paintings, in a style utterly her own. —Laura Jacobs