Tove Jansson murals, with hidden Moomins, seen for first time in Helsinki show

A white, hippo-like snout, matched in bulbosity by a well-padded paunch, no facial features bar a pair of inquisitive eyes: the simple rendering of the Finnish author Tove Jansson’s protagonist Moomintroll was key to the enduring success of her series of children’s books.

However, ahead of next year’s 80th anniversary of one of the most beloved set of literary characters ever created for children, Jansson’s home town, Helsinki, is shifting the spotlight away from those easy-to-draw spherical shapes to more complex marks made by the artist. Among them are intricate panoramas drawn in charcoal on tracing paper, oil-painted vignettes rendered on glass and monumental landscapes lavished on plaster walls.

The exhibition, entitled Paradise, at the Helsinki Art Museum focuses for the first time on the murals and frescoes Jansson was commissioned to paint on the walls of factory canteens, hospitals, nurseries and even churches – long before Moominmania conquered the world and the adventures of Snufkin, Snork Maiden and Little My became a Finnish secular religion.

“By the end of her life, Tove was most famous as a writer,” said the artist and author’s niece, Sophia Jansson, now president of the board of the company that manages her copyright. “But she always saw herself first and foremost [as] a painter. It was only later that her reputation as the ‘Moomin woman’ overtook her.”

Jansson, who died in 2001, was a modern Renaissance woman who produced books, plays, set designs, puppets and songs. In recent years, her oil paintings have been the subject of increasing interest to collectors, with one still life fetching €383,800 (£320,000) at an auction in Helsinki in 2023.

Yet Jansson’s public work has long been overlooked, in part because her commissioned pieces were considered separate from her artistic practice, and also because many have been destroyed or walled up. Sophia Jansson said she realised she “hadn’t seen half of them” until the Helsinki Art Museum attempted to track down the remaining works.

The show includes five original murals and several competition paintings, as well as large photographic reproductions of works that couldn’t be moved, and rolls of sketches for frescoes discovered during an inventory of Jansson’s studio that took place only last year.

In contrast, Jansson’s cast of philosophical creatures are a globe-spanning commercial franchise with an 80th-anniversary edition of The Moomins and the Great Flood soon to be published.

Jansson’s characters are familiar to young readers across Scandinavia, eastern Europe, the UK and Japan, and thanks to a deal in 2023 with the book chain Barnes & Noble, increasingly popular in the US. Spin-off TV shows, theme parks, stationary and table-ware generate an estimated €700m in merchandise sales every year.

Related: ‘Fascinating’: Tove Jansson’s Moomins notes to be published for first time

But in the 1940s and 50s, when Jansson made most of the murals on display in the Helsinki exhibition, the success of the Moominverse was confined to Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority. The Moomins and the Great Flood, for example, was not translated into Finnish until 1991 and with earnings through book sales still negligible, mural commissions from public authorities and private businesses were crucial to enable Jansson to repay a loan she had taken out to buy her own studio.

Moomintrolls still feature in a surprising number of these works, but less as an exercise in brand-building than in-jokes snuck in for Jansson’s own amusement. In her first major commission – a pair of large party-themed frescoes inside Helsinki city hall’s basement restaurant – a pot-bellied creature coyly hides behind a vase. The addition serves as a kind of spirit animal to the artist herself, here sat smoking at a table, her back turned to her then-lover Vivica Bandler.

More Moomin characters spill forth in the 1949 two-part fresco-secco Fairytale Panorama at a private kindergarten in the coastal town of Kotka, including the pair of snorkel-nosed creatures called Thingumy and Bob in their English translation. Their original Swedish names, Tofslan and Vifslan, identify them more clearly as coded alter egos of Tove and Vivica, whose same-sex relationship was still criminalised under Finnish law at the time.

What unites Jansson’s children’s stories and her wall paintings is that they are both emphatically escapist. The Moomin stories were conceived during the dark years of the second world war, which saw Finland fight first with, and then against, Nazi Germany.

In the flood-themed Moomin origin story and in 1946’s Comet in Moominland Jansson’s characters become refugees under threat from natural catastrophes. In the Helsinki Art Museum show, a small but expressive Jansson painting of the 1940 Soviet bombing of the city showed the real-life fears she was channelling.

But in Moominvalley, endings are always happy: no one is killed by the flood, the comet merely swooshes past. There are characters prone to melancholy and depression, such as the cold and lonely Groke, but even they are eventually embraced by the always welcoming Moomin family.

A similar optimism is embedded into Jansson’s murals. At the end of the second world war, Finland’s economy was in tatters, burdened with reparations payments to the Soviet Union. The boom in public artworks that ensued was motivated by desire to lift the national spirit and shore up a cultural identity from the ruins of war. Pastoral landscapes and childhood adventures abound. A large canvas painting called Fantasy, which Jansson painted on the walls of the Nordic Union bank’s new headquarters in 1953, is centred around Abundantia, the Roman goddess of wealth and prosperity bearing an overflowing cornucopia.

Even depictions of real-life industry, as would come to define the socialist-realist murals of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, were rare. Only once did a Jansson client, the electromechanical factory Strömberg, find her staff canteen painting too idyllic and urged her to make a second with towering pylons and bolts of electricity.

In 1955, Jansson was commissioned to make a mural at the children’s ward at Helsinki’s Aurora hospital, to ease the stress of new arrivals. The resulting painting, which is still in place, has Moomins, Mymbles and other creatures hurrying up the flight of stairs to bring gifts and flowers to two apprehensive-looking children on the first floor. At their best, her murals made the young artist realise that she was literally able to make people forget their troubles.