Pekka Halonen was a painter of Finnish landscapes and people in the national romantic style. His favorite subjects were the Finnish landscape and its people which he depicted in his Realist style.
Halonen chronicled the Finnish landscape and its people. He had an early interest in Symbolism, but Gauguin’s decorative Synthetism, as well as Japanese woodcuts, had a deeper impression on his work.
Halonen spent the summer of 1890 at home in Lapland on the Gulf. He studied French and took private lessons to assist in learning French more proficiently, in 1890 in Paris, first at the Academie Julian and later under Paul Gauguin.
In addition to painting, Pekka Halonen translated Swedish, Danish, German and Italian language versions of historical novels. The best-known of his Finnish translations were Benvenuto Cellini “My biography” (1905).
In his free moments, Pekka Halonen was happy sitting in his library browsing art books, about Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Dürer, Holbein the Younger, and Titian’s art.