Meeting engraver and artist Tuulikki Pietilä proved a turning point in Tove Jansson’s life. They found one another at the Artists’ Guild Christmas party in Helsinki in 1955, at the gramophone where the two of them were looking after the music, and their relationship gradually developed in the course of the following spring. “At last I’ve found my way to the one I want to be with,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of her first letters to Tuulikki Pietilä in the summer of 1956.

They had spent a few days on Bredskär and their love was deepening. I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom, Tove Jansson confided to her beloved, who had gone to teach at an “artists’ colony” in Korpilahti for a few weeks. Tove Jansson was left alone on the island, but she felt calm and full of confidence. 

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