In 1978, she satirized her situation in a short story titled “The Cartoonist” about a man called Stein contracted to produce a daily strip, Blubby, which has generated a Moomin-like universe of commercial paraphernalia-“Blubby curtains, Blubby jelly, Blubby clocks and Blubby socks, Blubby shirts and Blubby shorts.” “Tell me something,” another cartoonist asks Stein. The popularity of the Moomins spawned an empire of television shows, films, and theme parks, as well as all manner of merchandise from plastic toys to crockery.īut over time, Jansson came to feel exhausted by the Moomins and that their success had obscured her other ambitions as an artist. The books, in which Jansson intersperses her stories with simple line drawings of the Moomins and their adventures, have been translated into forty-four languages and have sold over fifteen million copies, in addition to which Jansson drew a Moomin cartoon strip syndicated to 120 newspapers around the world. Then, in 1945, she published The Moomins and the Great Flood, the first in a series of nine children’s books about a family of hippo-like creatures living in Moominvalley, a place of forests and rivers on the coast of Finland. Born in Finland, Jansson (1914–2001) contributed her first illustrations to Garm as a precocious fifteen-year-old, and alongside her magazine work she developed a successful career as a painter.

This piece, which is shown in the first room of a new retrospective of Jansson’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, represents a turning point in her career and life. Tampere Art Museum Moominvalley/Finnish National Gallery/Yehia Eweis/Moomin CharactersĪ cover illustration for Garm magazine by Tove Jansson, in which an early Moomin character appears, 1944 click to enlarge

Tove jansson art