The accomplished Swedish critic, Georg Nordensvan, opens his monograph on Carl Larsson with the statement that the latter is unquestionably the most popular artist of the present day in his own country, and that he is equally popular as a man. It is not often that the personality of an artist seems so essentially connected with his work as in Larsson's case. His gay, pugnacious, independent, yet amiable temper of mind is so directly reflected in the character of his various production as to make a consideration of the two together an almost necessary prelude to any account of him. He has insisted upon expressing his individuality at whatever cost of traditional and conventional technique and he has at the same time unconsciously represented the frankest, most wholesome, and, on the whole, most characteristic side of the Swedish character. A rather daring and flippant humor enters into his paintings. One of his portraits of himself shows him standing, his happy reddish face aglow, against a yellowish-brown wall. He is dressed in a long, yellowish-brown smoking frock, and holds in his raised hand a pencil from which appears to spring a little feminine figure supposed to represent his genius. "This figure carries what looks like a quantity of small round cookies," says his critic, "possibly to symbolize the adequacy with which his genius provides for his nourishment."

Another shows him with his little girl sitting on his head, maintaining her equilibrium by planting stout feet on his shoulders. The painter wears a house-jacket, loose slippers and baggy trousers, his face beams with good-humor; the child is brimming with laughter; the little scene is instinctive with the spirit of intimate domesticity, and the drawing, free and easy, without apparent effort in the direction of elegant arrangement or expressiveness of line, is nevertheless singularly nervous and vigorous.

In still another portrait, he is sitting before his easel, his little girl on one knee, his canvas on the other with the easel serving only as a prop. His eyes are turned toward a mirror which is outside the picture and the reflection in which he is using as a model; the child's eyes are fixed on the canvas watching the growth of the design. These are "self-portraits" in more than the usual sense. It is the rarest thing in art to find a painter representing his own aspect with such complete lack of self-consciousness. No characteristics seem especially to be emphasized, none betray exaggeration, there apparently is neither distortion nor idealization, nor is there any attempt to select a mood that shall preserve a favorable impression of the sitter. Nothing could, however, more favorably present a character to the critical scrutiny of strangers than this superb good faith. The least sentimental of us must recognize with frank delight the wholesome sweetness of the world these kindly faithful records open to us.

Larsson was born at Stockholm in 1853. From the age of thirteen he depended upon his own labors for support; retouching photographs at first. Later he entered the elementary school of the academy where he received honors. He drew from the antique and from the model and began to make drawings for illustration when he was about eighteen. The public knew him first through his drawings for the comic paper called Kasper, and he shortly became a much sought after illustrator for papers and books. The first book illustrated by him was a collection of stories by Richard Gustafsson, the editor of Kasper, the next was Anderson's "Tales." In the latter he succeeded Isidor TÖrnblom, who died in 1876 after having executed only a few drawings for the first part. He became bold and rapid in improvisation, and light and easy in execution—qualities that he never lost. He was obliged to make of his academic studies a side issue, bread-winning taking necessarily the first place with him. No doubt it is to this necessity that he owes that prompt adaptation of his facility to various uses, that practical application of his freshly acquired knowledge which give to the simple compositions of his earlier period an especial spontaneity. He had no time to fix himself in ruts of practice. To draw from the Antinous one day and the next to press one's Greek outline into service for the representation of little dancing girls and happy babies is to effect that union between art and life which makes the first moving and the second beautiful; the union in which Daumier found the source of his prodigious strength. In his early years Larsson was anything but a realist. His fancy turned to unusual and vast subjects, and his natural impatience caused him to launch himself upon them with very inadequate preliminary study. The first canvas attempted by him during the study-time in Paris (time which he won at the Academy) was nearly ten feet high and represented a scene from the deluge with figures double life size. Naturally, he found himself unable to cope with the difficulties that promptly arose and was obliged to give it up. In 1877, when he was twenty-four years old, he painted a three-quarter length portrait of a woman standing, which was his best work of that period. The genre pictures which he sent home to Stockholm at about the same time awakened little enthusiasm and spread the impression that he had no future as a painter and would be obliged to content himself with illustration. As an illustrator he became thoroughly successful, turning out a large amount of work and gaining for himself in Stockholm the very inappropriate name of "the Swedish DorÉ." He made enough money in this branch of art to try painting again in Paris, but with almost no success until the Spring of 1883, when he exhibited at the Salon a couple of small water-colors, the subjects taken from the field and garden life of Grez, a little painting village that lies south of the Fontainebleau forest. These pictures won a medal and were bought in Gothenburg. Other similar subjects followed, all distinguished, Nordensvan affirms, by the same pleasing delicacy of handling, the same glow and splendor of sunlight, and the same glad color-harmony. He now was in a position to marry, and pictures of family life presently appeared in great numbers. These are altogether charming—spirited, vivid, original, and full of an indescribable freshness and heartiness. Sometimes he painted his young wife holding her baby, sometimes he painted his two boys parading as mimic soldiers; sometimes it was his little girl hiding under the great, handsome dining-table; or a young people's party in the characteristic dining-room, all the furniture and decorations of which are reproduced with crisp naturalism.

Not the least charm of his paintings lies in the beauty of these handsome interiors in which detail has the precise definition found in the work of the old Dutch artists. While Larsson's technique lacks the exquisite finish of a Terborch or Vermeer of Delft he tells almost as many truths about a house and its occupants as they do. If we consider, for example, the charming composition which he calls "The Sluggard's Melancholy Breakfast" ("Sjusofverskans dystra frukost") we find worthy of note not only the pensive and rather cross little girl sitting alone at the table with her loaf of bread and cup of milk, but also the long tablecloth with its handsome conventional design, obviously a bit of artistic handicraft since it is signed and dated above the fringe at one end, the decoration on the wall, possibly the lower part of a painted window, with its significant motto "Arte et Probitate"; the graceful pattern of the chairs, the big pitcher full of flowers and fruits, the plain ample dishes, the polished floor of the passage-way at the end of which a door opens on the green fields with a child's figure half-seen standing on the threshold, the fine rich color harmony of greens and reds and blues and browns held together by a subtlety of tone that involves no loss of strength.

His outdoor scenes are hardly less personal in their portraiture. There is the one called "Apple-Bloom" with a Larsson child in a pink sunbonnet clinging to the slim stem of a young apple-tree; in the distance some long low red buildings behind a board fence, in the foreground the pale green of spring grass; there is the one in which the larger part of the picture is filled with delicate field growth, thin sprays of pink, blue and white blossoms, and long slender leaves, at the top of the canvas a little thicket of trees with a small bright head peering between the branches; there is the one in which a baby lies on the greensward under the trees; each has an indescribable charm of individuality. Doubtless resembling a hundred other groves or meadows, these have an expression of their own distinguishing them from their kind. It is the genius of the close observer for discrimination between like things.

Whatever the subject, the treatment is always brilliant, frank and joyous. Larsson's brushwork is light and flowing; he has, indeed, a certain French vivacity of technique, but his motives and his personal point of view are so purely Scandinavian as to leave no other impression on the mind. Nor is he merely the painter of the Swedish type. He is the painter of intimate home life and character as found within his own walls. Hardly any other family in Sweden is known so well as his, and the variety and enthusiasm of his mind lend spontaneity to these domestic pictures, so that one does not easily tire of the strong smiling creatures naturally and effectively presented to our vision.

In the field of mural decoration also he has shown marked originality. Under the encouragement of Mr. Pontus Furstenberg, one of the foremost patrons of art in Sweden, he tested himself on a series of paintings for a girl's school in Gothenburg. He accomplished his task in a manner entirely his own, taking for his subjects typical figures of women in Sweden at different periods of history—a Viking's widow; the holy Brigitta; a noble house mother of the time of the Vasas, etc.—but although his manner of painting was free and blithe it hardly satisfied the most severe critics on account of its lack of architectonic qualities and the absence in it of anything like monumental simplicity. He has continued, however, to go his own way in mural decoration and holds to the principle that the walls should look flat and that the harmony of color and line should be balanced and proportioned with regard to decorative and not to realistic effect. His subjects are apt to be fanciful and are executed in a semi-playful spirit not in the least familiar to an uninventive age, as where the spirit of the Renaissance is represented by a young woman seated high on a step-ladder, looking toward the sky, with Popes and Cardinals seated on the rungs below gazing in adoration, while underneath them all yawns the grave filled with skeletons, from which the Renaissance has risen.

On the subject of home arts and handicrafts Larsson has emphatic ideas and urges on his compatriots the desirability of preserving their national types. "Take care of your true self while time is," he says, "again become a plain and worthy people. Be clumsy rather than elegant: dress yourselves in furs, skins, and woolens, make yourselves things that are in harmony with your heavy bodies, and make everything in bright strong colors; yes, in the so-called gaudy peasant colors which are needed contrasts to your deep green pine forests and cold white snow." He has made designs for haute-lisse weaving which were executed by the Handicraft Guild and which were practically open air painting translated into the Gobelin weave. In all that he does he is free from the trammels of convention; but his chief triumphs are in a field that is sadly neglected in modern art. As a painter of family life he is surpassed by none of his contemporaries.