The Moomins did not go global from Helsinki. They went global from a London evening paper, and the first major Tove Jansson exhibition here in nearly a decade opens in Clerkenwell in November.
In September 1954, at a time when a woman drawing her own daily newspaper strip was close to unheard of, Tove Jansson’s Moomin strip launched in London’s Evening News. It ran for twenty-one years. Syndication took it from there to millions of readers worldwide, and it remains the most sustained stretch of Moomin drawing she ever did.
She handed the strip to her brother Lars in 1960, when the pleasure of drawing the Moomins had been worn down by how popular they had become. She kept answering every fan letter herself.
Tove Jansson and her Families opens at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration on 21 November and runs to 9 May 2027. The Centre sits just over a mile from Fleet Street, where the Evening News had its offices, which is either a coincidence or the nicest bit of programming of the year.
What is in it
More than a hundred rarely seen sketches, paintings, illustrations and photographs, plus drawings that have never been shown at all. It is the first UK exhibition to treat Jansson as an illustrator rather than as the Moomin woman, and the first to show her original works here in almost ten years.
Her childhood drawings go on public display in the UK for the first time, including a handmade book she made in 1922 called Prinsessan Glittergull. There is original art from the first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, published in 1945. There is a charcoal study for Bird Blue, the 3.5 by 2 metre mural she made for a school in 1953, which has never been shown in Britain, and which has a Moomin hidden in the vegetation near a boy who has fallen asleep reading.
And there are her illustrations for a Swedish edition of Alice in Wonderland from 1966, which almost nobody in this country has seen.
The families of the title
The show is built around the people who made her. Her mother, Signe Hammarsten Jansson, known as Ham, was the family breadwinner, a graphic designer and Finland’s first professional stamp designer, who drew every Finnish stamp from the 1940s until 1962. Her father Viktor was a sculptor. Ham drew every day, and Tove grew up assuming that was simply what adults did.
She began illustrating for the satirical magazine Garm at fifteen and used it to attack fascism openly through the war. The Moomins themselves took shape in the 1940s while she worked from a studio flat in Helsinki with the war going on outside.
Paul Gravett, who co-curated the show, puts it this way: the Moomin cast are drawn from her family, friends and lovers in Helsinki’s cultural circles and lesbian community, and her lifelong insistence on inclusivity and individuality has not dated at all.
The exhibition finishes on Klovharun, the bare island in the Pellinge archipelago no bigger than a football pitch, where Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent almost thirty summers in a one-room cottage with no electricity and no running water. That is where The Summer Book came from in 1972, built on her niece Sophia’s relationship with Ham.
The London x London Take: Go for the childhood drawings and the Alice illustrations rather than the Moomins, which you can see anywhere. The point of this show is that it takes her seriously as an illustrator across sixty years rather than as the author of one beloved thing, and the childhood work in particular is the bit you will not get another chance at. Book early: the Centre only opened in June, it is small, and a Moomin show over Christmas in a room that size will sell. Your ticket covers every exhibition on the day, so go on a Wednesday or Thursday, take Faerdom in as well, and give yourself longer than you think you need.
Need to know
- What: Tove Jansson and her Families
- Where: Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, 1 Myddelton Passage, London EC1R 1AG
- When: 21 November 2026 to 9 May 2027, Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm
- Price: £16.50 adults, £6.60 children, including donation. Free for members, membership from £45
- Booking: Public booking opens at 10am on Tuesday 22 September via qbcentre.org.uk
- Nearest station: Angel or Farringdon
- Also on: Faerdom: Now, As Ever by Fromm Studio, 23 October to 29 March 2027, and Quentin Blake: Performance until 4 April 2027. One ticket covers all of them
More to see in our round-up of London exhibitions right now, and the neighbourhood itself in our guide to things to do in Farringdon and Clerkenwell.
