Breakfast under the Big Birch
The Larsson family eat breakfast in the garden at Sundborn. Carl Larsson’s pictures of his home became a model for Swedish interior design and for the ideal of a good family life.
Clear outlines and light, flat areas of colour – influenced by Japanese woodblock prints and Art Nouveau.
Carl Larsson painted Breakfast under the Big Birch in 1896. It belongs to a series of watercolours of the family home, Lilla Hyttnäs, in Sundborn in Dalarna. Carl and Karin Larsson had been given the house by Karin’s father, and they rebuilt and furnished it over many years. The series was shown at the General Art and Industrial Exposition in Stockholm in 1897 and published in 1899 in the book A Home. In the 1880s Carl Larsson had lived in the artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing in France. There he switched from oil to watercolour, and there he also met Karin Bergöö, who was herself a trained painter.
The picture shows a long table laid in the garden in the shade of a large birch. Adults and children sit around the table, and it is clearly an ordinary summer morning rather than a celebration. Light filters through the foliage and falls on the tablecloth and the ground. The family is shown in the midst of everyday life, without posing.
The composition is open and airy. The table leads the eye into the picture, and the birch trunk frames the scene. Larsson first drew clear outlines and then filled in the areas with bright, fairly flat colours. The green of the foliage, the white of the tablecloth and the warm tones of the clothes give a light, calm impression.
Watercolour was Larsson’s principal technique in the pictures of his home. It suited quick, light images and could easily be reproduced in print. The style shows the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which many European artists collected around the turn of the century, and of the decorative lines of Art Nouveau. Larsson was also a skilled illustrator, and this shows in the clarity of the drawing.
The Sundborn pictures came to be seen as a programme for a new way of living. They show bright rooms, simple furniture, handwoven textiles and children who are allowed to take up space. Much of the interior was Karin Larsson’s work. She designed textiles and furniture, and scholars have recently emphasised that the home was a joint work of art. The ideas were close to Ellen Key’s thoughts on beauty in everyday life.
The pictures can also be read as an idealised self-image. Larsson shows a harmonious family, but his life and family also had conflicts and difficult periods that do not appear in the watercolours. The picture is thus both a depiction and an idyll.
A Home and the books that followed became very popular, also abroad, particularly in Germany. The pictures have since been printed in countless reproductions. The home at Sundborn is now a museum, Carl Larsson-gården, and attracts many visitors. Breakfast under the Big Birch has become one of the pictures that has most strongly shaped the idea of a Swedish summer home. Larsson himself most wanted to be remembered for his large monumental paintings, including those in the staircase of the Nationalmuseum. Yet it was the pictures of his home that made him most beloved by the public.