Who was Hilma af Klint? A guide to The Ten Largest

In 1907 a Swedish painter made ten canvases over three metres tall in about two months, then kept them out of sight. Today they are some of the most loved abstract paintings in Europe.

The painter

Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and made a living from portraits and botanical drawings. In private she was doing something else. Through a spiritual practice she shared with a group of women friends, she began in 1906 to paint large works of pure colour and form: spirals, petals, circles, letters. They were abstract years before Kandinsky, Mondrian or Malevich published anything similar.

She showed this work to very few people and asked that it should not be exhibited until long after her death. It was only from the 1980s that it reached a wide public, and the retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018–19 became one of the most visited exhibitions in that museum's history.

The Ten Largest

The Ten Largest is a cycle of ten paintings about the stages of a human life: childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. Each canvas is roughly 3.2 by 2.4 metres, painted in tempera on paper and later mounted on canvas. The colour tells you where you are in life: the Youth paintings glow orange, Adulthood turns lilac, and old age fades towards pale pink and white.

No. 3 and No. 4, Youth: pink, blue and yellow forms bloom and spiral over a warm orange ground.
No. 7, Adulthood: two golden, lantern-like shapes stacked on lilac, framed by red leaves and green circles.

Living with the paintings

Because the originals are huge, the compositions are built to be seen from a distance, which is exactly what a wall at home needs. They also hold up at large print sizes: a single 70×100 cm print above a sofa or bed carries the whole wall.

The palettes suggest their own rooms. The orange Youth paintings love sage green, cream, deep blue and terracotta walls. Adulthood's lilac and gold look calm against pale grey, white and oak. For a pair, hang No. 3 and No. 4 side by side in the same size, 8 cm apart; for a trio, put No. 7 in the middle.