DOI Heft:
No. 323 (February 1920)
DOI Artikel:Wåhlin, Karl: Carl Larsson
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21359#0195
CARL LARSSON
"in mother's bed” (1908)
WATER-COLOUR BY CARL LARSSON
(In the collection of Carl Piltz, Esq.,
Stockholm)
However, Larsson had far too rich a gift
of imagination and too versatile a technical
training to stick to water-colours, in spite
of the success he had won with them. He
wished for bigger tasks and he found them
— thanks to Pontus Fiirstenberg, the
Gothenburg merchant, who became the
supporter of our struggling young artists
at a period when they had a very bad
character with the official keepers of art
in Stockholm. For his art gallery Larsson
painted three large decorative canvases,
Renaissance, Rococo, and Modern Art, en-
closing them in a framework of figures
modelled and cut in wood by his own hand.
This was his only achievement in the
sphere of sculpture, but it shows his know-
ledge and artistic command of the human
form in the very best light. At the bidding
of that same Maecenas he was entrusted
with the decorating of the staircase in a
girls' school. In a series of pictures he
there painted the Swedish woman in
different periods of our history, from the
woman of the stone age up to Fredrika
Bremer, the champion of women's emanci-
pation in the nineteenth century, a a
In 1891, Larsson moved to Stockholm,
where an important task within the scope of
monumental art attracted him. He had
successfully taken part in a couple of
competitions for carrying out frescoes in
the National Museum, and after having
been chosen for the task in question, he
accomplished it according to his own plan-
ning and after his own fashion in such a
way as to make this great work the centre
of all his enormously rich production.
Here Ehrenstrahl, the Hamburg painter
who became u the father of the Swedish art
of painting," is seen occupied in portraying
Charles XI; here stands the great archi-
tect Nicodemus Tessin the younger, on the
scaffolding of the castle of Stockholm, his
life-work ; here the French painter Tara-
val teaches the first generation of Swedish
art students in his life class; here is
Lovisa Ulrica, the clever and literary sister
of Frederick the Great, eagerly looking at
the French engravings shown her by the
189
"in mother's bed” (1908)
WATER-COLOUR BY CARL LARSSON
(In the collection of Carl Piltz, Esq.,
Stockholm)
However, Larsson had far too rich a gift
of imagination and too versatile a technical
training to stick to water-colours, in spite
of the success he had won with them. He
wished for bigger tasks and he found them
— thanks to Pontus Fiirstenberg, the
Gothenburg merchant, who became the
supporter of our struggling young artists
at a period when they had a very bad
character with the official keepers of art
in Stockholm. For his art gallery Larsson
painted three large decorative canvases,
Renaissance, Rococo, and Modern Art, en-
closing them in a framework of figures
modelled and cut in wood by his own hand.
This was his only achievement in the
sphere of sculpture, but it shows his know-
ledge and artistic command of the human
form in the very best light. At the bidding
of that same Maecenas he was entrusted
with the decorating of the staircase in a
girls' school. In a series of pictures he
there painted the Swedish woman in
different periods of our history, from the
woman of the stone age up to Fredrika
Bremer, the champion of women's emanci-
pation in the nineteenth century, a a
In 1891, Larsson moved to Stockholm,
where an important task within the scope of
monumental art attracted him. He had
successfully taken part in a couple of
competitions for carrying out frescoes in
the National Museum, and after having
been chosen for the task in question, he
accomplished it according to his own plan-
ning and after his own fashion in such a
way as to make this great work the centre
of all his enormously rich production.
Here Ehrenstrahl, the Hamburg painter
who became u the father of the Swedish art
of painting," is seen occupied in portraying
Charles XI; here stands the great archi-
tect Nicodemus Tessin the younger, on the
scaffolding of the castle of Stockholm, his
life-work ; here the French painter Tara-
val teaches the first generation of Swedish
art students in his life class; here is
Lovisa Ulrica, the clever and literary sister
of Frederick the Great, eagerly looking at
the French engravings shown her by the
189