Önningeby Village and Artists' Colony

Önningeby, a village about 6 km northeast of Mariehamn, was the site of a significant artists' colony in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The village and its surroundings — meadows, birch forests, and the particular flat light of the Baltic landscape — attracted Finnish and Swedish painters for decades from the 1880s onward. Today the village is quiet and agricultural, with the old studio of Victor Westerholm preserved as a small heritage site.

The road from Mariehamn to Önningeby passes through typical Åland countryside — small farms, occasional windmills, and the flat horizon of the archipelago. A cycling route connects the village to Mariehamn; the ride takes about thirty minutes.

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A story
Önningeby became an artists' colony in the 1880s, when a group of Finnish and Swedish painters began spending summers in the village attracted by the particular quality of the Baltic light over the surrounding fields and water. The colony was active for decades and produced a significant body of work now held in Finnish and Swedish museum collections. Victor Westerholm, the most prominent artist associated with the colony, spent forty summers in Önningeby and produced hundreds of paintings of the Åland landscape that largely created the visual idea of what Åland looks like in the collective imagination.

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