Three Smiths Statue
statue in Helsinki of three smiths, created 1932 by Felix Nylund
The Three Smiths Statue (Finnish: Kolmen sepän patsas) is a sculpture by Felix Nylund, situated in Helsinki, Finland, in Three Smiths Square at the intersection of Aleksanterinkatu and Mannerheimintie. This realistic statue, unveiled in 1932, depicts three naked smiths hammering on an anvil.
Felix Nylund submitted a design for a smith statue for a memorial for Johan Vilhelm Snellman in 1913. In 1919 he designed a monumental statue with three smiths located on top of a stone pillar ten metres high. Neither of these designs was actually made into a statue, but Nylund took advantage of his previous designs when sculpting the Three Smiths Statue.
Of the three smiths depicted in the statue, one is a master smith holding the iron on an anvil. The other two smiths are hammering on the iron. Nylund used wrestlers from the gymnastics and sports club Jyry as models for the smiths' bodies. The master smith has the face of poet Arvid Mörne, the smith holding his hammer up has Nylund's own face, and the smith holding his hammer down has the face of sculptor Aku Nuutinen. It is said that mason Paavo Koskinen and police officer Sundström posed as models for the bodies.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7797830. Authority coordinates are 60.169, 24.941. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1913 and 1919.
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This entry incorporates text from “Three Smiths Statue” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.