Studio: international art (78.1919)

CARL LARSSON

“ THE ARTIST'S HOUSE IN FALUN” (igil)
BY CARL LARSSON

(I11 the collection of Carl Piltz, Esq., Stockholm)

perhaps never more so than within his
own home and in the presence of the
happenings there. It is his smiling and
kindly way of looking at home and every-
day life that has come to us heavy and
melancholy Swedes as a blessed message
of joy, and that has created a quite un-
paralleled understanding between the artist
and all his Swedish public. To him may
well be applied what was once said about
old Gustavus Wasa: he was writh the

Kingdom, and the Kingdom with him well
satisfied. 0 0 0 0 0

Two entirely different kinds of danger
threatened Larsson's artistic career from
the very outset. One was his dire poverty,
which, even late in the days of his opulence,
he could not speak about without shudder-
ing, and which nearly caused him to break
down in misery and despair. The other
was the means of livelihood that was offered
to him in book-illustrating, in which no
artistic quality was demanded, and that

led him into a mannerism from which he
could only gradually free himself through
the most earnest work. His deep con-
sciousness of his artistic calling and the
energy of his character rescued him from
these dangers of his years of study. After
a few years of extravagant, artistic fancies,
without a sufficient substratum of reality,
he eventually emerged as the finished,
highly cultivated artist in his exquisite
water-colours from Grez in France, where,
during some years in the eighties, a Swed-
ish colony of painters had settled. It was
in Grez that he won his noble wife and
companion in all the vicissitudes of life,
Karin Bergoo, who, thanks to the brush of
Carl Larsson, will, for many generations to
come, stand as the archetype of the Swed-
ish wife, mother, and mistress of the house.
We read his praise of her in his paintings
just as in the Proverbs we find a word-pic-
ture of the good and diligent wife, the keeper
and guardian angel of her household. 0