August Jansen

As a painter, August Jansen is a characteristic example of the inevitability of becoming an artist. In the childhood the model of the father, being a decorator, the first school of drawing already at the age of 14 and as its logical continuation in the beginning of the century studies in the Art Promoting Society School in St.Petersburg and in the higher art school of the Academy of Arts. Between the two World Wars August Jansen was one of the most many-sided organizer of the art life, an active lecturer and a remarkably fruitful painter.
In his works Jansen always returned to the observation of the homeland that was a mixture of the etnographic wish of recording and a national-romantic celebration of work and country life. Yard of the Lauri farm house is characteristic both to the Jansen's creation and to a certain part of the Estonian culture that continuously reaches out for its roots, striving to return to the genuine and intact country life. The extraordinary motion of the clouds and the sky, a tree, rising directly from the heart of the picture towards the sky and a massive farm house add a rarely seen sublimity. That is also understandable, because the Lauri farm house and the Miku farm house are Jansen's most loved motifs, as both of them were located near his home at Põllküla.