Stop and Look – “Letter-writing” (1912) by Carl Larsson
The many watercolours that Carl Larsson made of his home and family show their subjects intimately: in their daily activities, doing homework, celebrating a friend’s name-day, gardening, or simply resting, either indoors or outside under a large tree. They are often comic scenes, demonstrating the quirks of individual characters or illustrating the minor accidents that occur in the course of an ordinary life.
Here a young friend, the daughter of one of the people who worked for Larsson and his wife Karin, sits writing a letter in an airy room lit by a big window in front of which geraniums are twisting into a maze of interwoven stems. They are arranged on a practical (and incidentally very modern-looking) plant stand, with austerely rectangular support beneath their intricate organic patterns.
On the other side of the room, the intently concentrating girl’s hair is woven into an elaborate plait, trailing over her striped blouse. An apron edged with broderie anglaise is tied around her slim waist. As she concentrates on her letter, we feel we know her even though we can’t even see her face.
The sweetness and charm of Larsson’s watercolours belie his own character. For all his devotion to wife and family, he was a truculent and difficult man, given to unpredictable changes of mood and opinion. He made many enemies as well as friends, but his art is the very embodiment of good humour and domestic warmth.
Little known in Britain, he is an understandably popular artist in his native Sweden. Although his most characteristic works reflect his own domestic life, he also painted on a vast scale, making large – and controversial – murals for the walls of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and decorations for other public buildings.
Early in his career, in the 1880s, he joined the artists’ community at Grez-sur-Loing in France, painting in the most up-to-date international style of the time, very similar to the work of his French and English colleagues there. His many accomplished portraits are full of character and originality of perception. All his work overflows with the same amiable charm, and his love for his wife Karin and their children emerges palpably from his pictures of a domestic life that alternates joyously between the serene and the turbulent.
Despite his excursion into a Frenchified plein-air modernism while he was at Grez-sur-Loing, he preferred an essentially linear style, which dictates the character of most of his work, whether it is in oils or watercolour. But it’s in watercolour that he seems most himself.
There’s a literal directness about Larsson’s observation of his world that might appear almost naïve in its refusal to adopt fashionable techniques. But his visual language is in fact very typical of the Scandinavian version of Art Nouveau.
The intertwining plant stems and suavely delineated lines of the girl’s body in Letter-writing, contrasted with the plain geometry of the unpretentious Swedish interior, seem to tell us precisely how the sophistication of contemporary aesthetic ideas fits into a down-to-earth and orderly existence.
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