“Above all, one thing has succeeded very well for me, something I have always longed to do but have never succeeded in, i.e., never even attempted. It is namely a sketch for a Madonna. Just as an attempt, it has turned out the best among my current works, the most spiritual both in colour and form.” This is what Konrad Mägi writes to a friend in July of 1915. This painting is full of mysteries. Who is this woman? Is it the dancer Ella Ilbak, a good acquaintance of Mägi? But why don’t we see her face, and why is her hair like that, and what landscape is she sitting in? Does the title of the painting, “Meditation,” suggest that the lady is meditating? Is she meditating because, according to an important philosopher for Konrad Mägi, through meditation one can experience the higher sphere beyond the visible world? Or is the model dealing with darker spheres, as Ella Ilbak participated in spiritualist seances where contact was made with spirits, and at least once Ilbak reportedly sensed a burst of light? Or is this painting inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s novels or poems – as Mägi himself is said to have mentioned? Or is its inspiration actually Friedebert Tuglas’s novel “At the World’s End,” where on a solitary island amidst fairytale plants lives a giantess whose hair is woven with silver threads, who wears a veil around her head, and who in the evenings watches the setting sun over the sea. “It was the great tuning of the whole person, the emotions and thoughts,” Tuglas writes.

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