Carl Larsson [antikvár]

Carl Larsson: A dream of happiness and a good life The house in Stockhohn where Carl Larsson was bom Cai-1 Larsson himself has provided us with the means, in the form of his artistic work, through which we can trace the close correspondence not only of his unique personality but also of his art to his own hfe. Anyone familiar with his picture books Our Home, Our Place in the Country and My Family feels himself transported upon reading them to peaceful, almost heavenly surroundings. Yet Larsson is not portraying some dreamlike idyll here; rather, his drawings painted in watercolour reproduce a reality that has been experienced by the artist and can thus be regarded as a visual journal. However, the albums only bear witness to the second half of his life, from about 1885 onwards, although they should also be appreciated as a hard-won counter-image to his truly dreadful childhood and youth. Carl Larsson was born in 1853 in Prastgatan No. 78, a house on the Tyska Stallplan in the Stockholm Old Town of Gamla Stan. His mother was later thrown out of the house, together with Carl and his brother Johan; after enduring a series of temporary dwellings, the family moved into Grev Magnigrand No. 7 (later No. 5) in what was then Ladugardsland, present-day Ostermalm. "As a rule, each room was home to thi-ee families; penury, filth and vice thrived there, leisurely seethed and smouldered, eaten-away and rotten bodies and souls. Such an environment is the natural breeding ground for cholera," he wrote in his autobiographical novel Me {Jag, Stockholm, 1931, p.21). The disease indeed broke out once again in 1866, plunging the poor quarter into even greater misery. As a result of plague and crop failure, more than 100,000 people left their Swedish homeland between 1868 and 1873 to emigrate to America. The fact that the poor quarter was pulled down as early as the 1890s is an indication of just how miserable living conditions in the working-class area were. "It was Hell on Earth! Hunger was the least of our problems - in time, you get accus-