Rob A. wrote:Näköala Haminalahdesta [...] There are a few other points I'm wondering about, too...such as why the title couldn't have been "Näköala Haminalahdelta".....but, enough for now; some other time....:D :D
Place names are tricky in that they can take both inner locative cases and outer locative cases and it’s really only the locals who know what they prefer. For example, Tampere is typically used in the outer locative cases (Tampereella, Tampereelle, Tampereelta) whereas Helsinki in the inner locative cases (Helsingissä, Helsingistä, Helsinkiin) – which is all fine and dandy since they’re basically “just names” so there’s no logic to them. But then you have places like Riihimäki (
riihi = drying barn,
mäki = hill, slope) where the locals prefer the inner locative cases (Riihimäessä, Riihimäestä, Riihimäkeen) whereas to outsiders, the outer locative cases (Riihimäellä, Riihimäeltä, Riihimäelle) would sound more natural since the word
mäki is normally used in the outer locative cases. So the established compromise appears to be that both actually get used and are “allowed” in normal language.
Research Institute for the Languages of Finland maintains
this list of Finnish municipalities and how their names should be inflected in cases. But there are probably hundreds or thousands local names of villages and smaller places or geographical features which are not on the list because they are not names of municipalities. (It’s a bit like the pronunciation of some English place names. Greenwich, Leicester, etc. You just can’t be sure simply by looking at the written form.)
Now, putting the difference between the inner locative cases and the outer locative cases aside, both interpretations about the vantage point are possible in Finnish.
Näköala Haminalahdesta can mean either the vista of that place, radiating at you... or the opposite: the vantage point of the artist; the place where (s)he was sitting or standing while capturing his/her surroundings on the canvas. There’s no way to tell for sure which interpretation is the more appropriate one... unless you recognize the place or know the background story to that painting.
Näköala Haminalahdelle would be less ambiguous. Then it’s the view from the artist’s vantage point to the direction of Haminalahti.
• • •
As for titles of paintings, here’s
the online catalog of the Finnish National Gallery. You might want to use
the Finnish version, though, so you’d see more of the names in Finnish.
You can narrow down your searches by the type of the artwork (painting, graphics, drawing, photograph, sculpture etc.) and by the decade. For example, here are
paintings from the 1890s that are in their collection. (Note: the site occasionally takes a long time to do the searches. You can switch from a text-only results list to
a thumbnails view or to
a single artwork view by clicking the icons
at the top-right corner of the list. Or search for other decades, or for other types of artwork.)
There is also a bay in front of the city of Harbour so that would be Harbour's Bay. And as you know places don't follow the logics.
or one of these 
....rather macacbre yet appealing.... 