Carl Larsson

Biography

The canvas “Midvinterblot” (“Midwinter Sacrifice”) measures about six by fourteen metres. Larsson finished it in 1915, and the board of the National Museum in Stockholm rejected it. In his memoirs the artist admitted that it broke him, but wrote in the same passage that once he was gone the painting would be given a far worthier place.

He was right, though not in his lifetime.

Larsson was born on 28 May 1853 in Stockholm, in the Gamla stan district. His parents lived in great poverty: his mother worked as a laundress, his father as a casual labourer and a stoker, and he drank and took out his temper on his son. Later the family moved from place to place, and at one point the mother was left in the street with her two sons, Carl and Johan. When the boy was thirteen, the teacher at his school for poor children noticed him and advised him to apply to the school of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. He was admitted, but at first felt like a second-class person and was shy. In 1869 he was moved up to the “antique school” of the academy, where he found his feet and became a conspicuous figure among the students; he won his first award for a drawing of the nude. At the same time he drew caricatures for the humorous paper “Kasper” and illustrations for “Ny Illustrerad Tidning” (“New Illustrated Magazine”). According to some accounts, he also earned money as a photographer’s retoucher. His earnings were enough to help his parents.

In 1877 Larsson went to Paris and worked hard for several years without success. He did not move closer to the Impressionists: together with other Swedes he kept aloof from radical change. He spent two summers at Barbizon, and in 1882 he settled in the Scandinavian artists’ colony at Grez-sur-Loing. There he met the painter Karin Bergöö, whom he married in 1883. There too he painted several of his most important works, now in watercolour and quite unlike his earlier oil paintings. The first watercolours from Grez, sent to the Paris Salon of 1883, won a third-class medal.

In 1885 he returned to Sweden and painted scenes of southern Stockholm in the open air. From 1886 to 1891 he directed the Valand School of Fine Art in Gothenburg; among his pupils was Ester Almqvist, to whom he dedicated an etching. For a girls’ secondary school in Gothenburg he painted the staircase hall with the series “Svenska kvinnan genom seklen” (“Swedish Women Through the Centuries”), running from a Stone Age woman and a mother of the Viking age to Fredrika Bremer at her writing desk. The painting was done directly on the wall and finished in the autumn of 1890. Murals and canvases for schools, museums and public buildings were what he regarded as the main business of his life.

In 1888 his wife’s parents gave the young family a small house, Lilla Hyttnäs, at Sundborn near Falun. The family furnished it to their own taste; many of the interiors seen in the pictures were devised by Karin, who also worked as an interior designer. The couple had eight children, and the family became Larsson’s chief subject. A series of pen-and-ink drawings lightly tinted, “Ett hem i Dalarne” (“A Home in Dalarna”), was shown at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, was published in colour print in 1899 as “Ett hem” (“A Home”), and the following year was bought by the National Museum. Other Sundborn albums followed. In 1901 the family moved to Sundborn for good, and in Stockholm a farewell dinner was held for Larsson, attended by nearly two hundred friends and admirers.

The albums made him known far beyond Sweden. In 1909 the German publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche brought out the book “Das Haus in der Sonne” (“The House in the Sun”): 40,000 copies sold in three months, and by 2001 it had been reprinted more than forty times. Larsson and his wife said themselves that they were overwhelmed by such success. It seems to me telling that a man who thought of himself first of all as a muralist was made famous by small watercolours of a kitchen and a nursery.

For the vestibule of the National Museum he painted six frescoes (1896) and, this time in oil, “Gustav Vasas intåg i Stockholm 1523” (“Gustav Vasa’s Entry into Stockholm in 1523”), hung in 1907. His other commissions included a ceiling painting and lunettes for the Stockholm Opera and a mural for the Norra Latin school, as well as portraits of Oscar Levertin and August Strindberg. He also worked as an etcher.

In his last years Larsson suffered from bouts of depression. While he was working on “Midvinterblot” his eyesight worsened and his headaches grew more severe. In 1919 he was working on his memoirs. He died on 22 January 1919 in Falun and was buried in the cemetery of Sundborn Church.

The fate of “Midvinterblot” turned out to be a long one. In 1987 it was offered to the museum free of charge; the museum declined, and the canvas was bought by a Japanese collector, Hiroshi Ishizuka. In 1992, at an exhibition of Larsson’s work, the painting hung for the first time on the wall intended for it. The public’s response led the experts to reconsider, and in 1997 the museum bought the canvas back with private donations. It has hung ever since where it was painted to hang.