Carl Larsson
The painter who shaped the Swedish home.
Carl Larsson painted monumental murals but became best known for the watercolours of his house in Sundborn. The pictures spread through books and shaped the dream of the light, airy Swedish home.
Carl Larsson was born in 1853 in Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm, and grew up in great poverty. A teacher discovered his talent, and at just thirteen he was admitted to the preparatory school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. Early on he supported himself as a newspaper artist and illustrator.
During the 1870s he tried to make his name in Paris with large Salon paintings, but without success. The turning point came at the artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing in 1882, where he switched to watercolour and plein-air painting. There he also met the painter Karin Bergöö, whom he married in 1883. He was one of the Opponents in 1885. During the difficult years in Paris he also struggled with depression, which he later described openly.
In 1888 the couple were given the house Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn in Dalarna by Karin’s father. The house, which they rebuilt and furnished together, became the subject of the watercolours collected in the book A Home in 1899. The originals are in the Nationalmuseum. The book was printed in large editions, especially in Germany, and made the family’s light, simple home an ideal.
Larsson saw himself primarily as a monumental painter. He painted frescoes in the staircase of the Nationalmuseum, completed in 1896. The large oil painting Midwinter Sacrifice of 1915, intended for the same staircase, was rejected after a fierce debate. This hurt him deeply. The painting was finally hung in its intended place only in 1997. His style is marked by clear outlines, flat areas of colour and the influence of Japanese woodblock prints and Art Nouveau. He also made decorations for the patron Pontus Fürstenberg’s art gallery in Gothenburg. He and Karin had eight children, and the children appear again and again in the pictures, at play, doing schoolwork and at celebrations.
He died in 1919 in Falun. His autobiography, Me, was published after his death and reveals a darker side behind the idyll. The Carl Larsson House in Sundborn is now a museum, and his pictures have shaped how both Swedes and the rest of the world imagine the Swedish home.