Biography

Carl Larsson Biography

Carl Larsson – Swedish artist, 1853—1919

carl larsson 1
Carl Larsson

It is difficult to be­lieve that the Swedish artist whose paint­ings are the embodiment of delightfull family life could have grown up in the squalor of the slums of Stockholm. He wrote, “If I say that the people who lived in these houses were swine I am doing those animals an injustice. Misery, filth and vice .. . seethed and smoldered cozily.” Carl Larsson went to a “poor school,” where, when he was thirteen, a teacher recognized his talent and encouraged him to attend Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

When he was twenty-two, one of his paintings won the Royal Medal. Two years later, he moved to France; there he tell in love with another painter, whom he had met earlier in Stockholm. Within a few days Karin Bergoo and Carl Larsson were engaged. Feeling holed up in his studio, Larsson switched from painting in oils to watercolors; he then joined the movement of “open air” painters, “1 looked at Nature for the first time,” he said. “1 chucked the bizarre into the trash-heap … I have now given Nature a wide embrace, no matter how simple it may be. The pregnant, lusty earth is going to be the theme of my painting ”

Carl Larsson and Bergdd married in 1883, and his painting of her as a bride was the first in his life­long series of family portraits. Carl Larsson had been in and out of France for the better part of eight years when this occurred to him: “Why in the name of all that’s blue-green not paint Swed­ish nature in Sweden itself!” Then Karin’s father left them a cottage — Little Hyttnas — and at last they had a place to call home in Sweden. Scraping together what money they could, they took the tumbledown shack on a pile of slag and added a room here and there, built some furni­ture, and of course painted everywhere, creating a monument to everyday beauty.

Ett Hem - Carl Larsson 1899
Ett Hem. Carl Larsson. First edition, 1899.

This home at Sundbom is celebrated in Larsson’s own book Ett Hem (1899). Lennart Rudstrom has written a biography for children based on Larsson’s book: A Home (1968, trans. 1974) was a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book. Rudstrom’s series continued with A Farm (1966, trans. 1967) and A Family (1979, trans. 1980). The books are all illustrated by Larsson’s paintings of rooms in his home, the fields of the farm, the river, and the island. But most of all they are filled with his seven chil­dren.

“The first picture in the whole series is the one [of] Pontus, who … had been impertinent at the dinner table and been ordered out of the room.” Larsson found the boy sulking in a cor­ner and “noticed how the rebellious lad stood out sharply against the plain background.” Most often the paintings are of happy, cherished chil­dren, in daily life or ritual festivals, articulated by Larsson’s characteristic curling lines. It was as if by creating the home for them to live in, and then painting his children in this idyllic setting, he was banishing all the ghosts of his miserable childhood. And in doing so, he gave people the world over enduring images of home.

J.A..

Source: Children’s Books and their Creators, Anita Silvey.


Carl Larsson Illustrated Books

  • 1895: De mina. (My Loved Ones)
  • 1899: Ett hem (A Home)
  • 1902: Larssons (The Larssons)
  • 1906: Spadarfvet – mitt lilla lantbruk (A Farm)
  • 1910: Åt solsidan (On the Sunny Side)
  • 1913: Andras barn (Other People’s Children)
  • 1931: Jag (I, Carl Larsson) (autobiography)

BOOKSTORE: Rare, Antiquarian, First editions, Illustrated Children's Books

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