Carl Larsson
Before the Mirror
Reproduction of an oil self-portrait of 1909
Carl Olof Larsson was born to a poor family in Stockholm in 1855. At the age of 13 he entered the first rung of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. On graduating, like many other young Scandinavian artists, Carl Larsson travelled to France, then the centre of modern art. He soon gravitated to the Scandinavian art colony at Grez-sur-Loing. There he met his future wife, the artist Karin Bergöo. Carl Larsson is now best remembered for the watercolours he painted of their home and family life in Sundborn; these, by recording and popularising Karin Larsson's radical stripped-down decorative schemes and loose aesthetic-style dresses, created what we now think of as Scandinavian style. This style has proved so powerful and enduring that it still prevails in the furniture of Ikea and the clothes of Gudrun Sjödén.
Carl Larsson
Empire: Dansös vid göteborgs Teater, 1891
Etching
Published in 1892 by der Gesselschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in the survey of international etching Vervielfältigende Kunst der Gegenwart
The 1997 exhibition at the V&A, Carl and Karin Larsson: Creators of the Swedish Style (with an excellent catalogue edited by Michael Snodin and Elisabet Stavenow-Hidemark), rightly gave Karin equal billing and equal attention, a shifting of gender perspectives that has proved equally fruitful in assessing other Scandinavian artistic partnerships of the time, such as Anna and Michael Ancher, Marie and P. S. Krøyer, Oda and Christian Krohg, and Sigrid Hjertén and Isaac Grünewald, whose work was explored in the exhibition Nordic Artist Couples Around 1900 at the Skagens Museum in 2006, with a short but informative catalogue by Margareta Gynning.
Carl Larsson
Dagmar Grill
Lithographic facsimile after a colour drawing, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste
Carl Larsson’s oil paintings and murals now seem rather heavy-handed and overworked, but his watercolours have retained their freshness and charm, and the same is true of his etchings. Larsson made 112 etchings, aquatints, and drypoints; colour lithographs were also made from a number of his watercolours. Many of the etchings were published by the Swedish Association for Graphic Art, Föreningen för Grafisk Konst. His original graphics have been catalogued by Bertil, Gunnel and Svenolof Hjert in Carl Larsson: Grafiska Werk (1983), which unfortunately I have not yet seen.
Carl Larsson
Skyddsängeln, 1898
Etching
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste
Carl Larsson died in 1919. Because of the widespread distribution of his work in cheap reproductions – books, postcards, posters, calendars – and the sentimental context in which those reproductions have been published, he is perhaps not as widely admired today as he should be for the sheer draughtsmanship of his watercolours and etchings. Nor is it sufficiently recognized how important a development it was that a major male artist should make the home and the family the supreme focus of his life’s work.
Carl Larsson
Karin och Kersti
Etching, 1904
Published in 1905 by der Gesellschaft für Vervielfältigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Künste
The tenderness and delicacy of Carl Larsson’s depictions of Karin and their children, and his celebration of the home as a shared work of art, are very striking in their acceptance of the feminine as a vital component of the artistic life. Although Karin Larsson’s essential contribution to the Larsson’s experiment in living was subsumed in the more public and commercial of her husband, there is no doubt in the work itself that this was a partnership of supportive equals.
Carl Larsson
Modellen ved kaminen
Etching with aquatint, 1908
Published in 1909 by the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Paris
7 comments:
There is a lovely watercolor of Grez-sur-Loing in the collection of the Musee D'Orsay by Larsson that I assumed, I'm embarrassed to say, was by someone else with the same name. You are right about the context being crucial. These are charming images that don't overly idealize the real women they portray. We forget how radical the loose reform dress was for women, now that it has become the uniform of conventional suburbanites.
I really had very little interest in Carl Larsson until the V&A exhibition, which was one those shows that is so well-conceived and well-curated that it completely changes your mind about an artist or an art movement. They had reconstructions of the rooms and all sorts of objects and fabrics as well as conventional artworks. Suddenly you realised how radical their aims were. The sentimentality of the Larsson picture books is something that was visited on them by publishers aiming to make money; it's not intrinsic to the Larsson vision, which is about true sentiment and right living.
He really was a marvelous painter. I was just looking at some of interior portraits today and continue to be astonished at their charm and livability.
I believe Carl Larsson's original intention with the interiors was to showcase Karin's interior design ideas as much as it was to record their family life. It's interesting that P.S. Krøyer made very similar watercolours of his home and family life; because they never had the wide distribution and commercialisation of Larsson's work, they haven't dented his artistic reputation in the same way.
i absolutely love these works, especially the Dagmar girl... you are right, there is a tenderness about them that makes my heart ache.
what does Skyddsängeln mean? the angels from the sky?
Roxana, you always see straight to the heart. The title of the etching is the same as the title of the post: guardian angel.
you are so kind, Neil, thank you for the encouragement, i am always shy to say something here because i cannot bring any useful insight/knowledge, as you well know :-(
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