IN 1888, THE Swedish painter Carl Larsson and his wife, Karin, were given a remote log cottage in the village of Sundborn, 140 miles north of Stockholm, by her father. Over three decades, the couple transformed the house, which they named Lilla Hyttnäs, into an elaborate meta-art project, a hand-embellished 14-room home for their eight children. Carl depicted them in more than a hundred Arts and Crafts-inflected watercolors, gamboling amid wildflowers and curled up in Gustavian chairs in rooms painted and stenciled in shades of ocher, crimson and teal. His paintings, which he published reproductions of in books translated into eight languages — “Ett Hem” (“A Home,” 1899) and “Das Haus in der Sonne” (“The House in the Sun,” 1909) — helped form Sweden’s national identity and imprinted on the world an indelible image of rural Nordic wholesomeness.
Norman Rockwell, to whom Carl is sometimes compared, would later similarly idealize small-town life, but the difference in the two artists’ approach is elemental: To make the hyperrealistic oil paintings reproduced on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell, who was born and raised in Manhattan, first photographed models in his studio. Larsson painted from life — his own — though he presented an elaborately constructed version.
Carl died of a stroke in 1919 at age 65 (Karin died nine years later) and, since the 1940s, Lilla Hyttnäs has been maintained by a group of more than 300 descendants, who use parts of the property and open other areas to visitors. During their lifetimes, Carl and Karin also designed two private dwellings nearby to accommodate the overflow of children and guests. Today the residences stand with Lilla Hyttnäs as a homage to the Larssons’ vivid aesthetic, which helped pave the way for the patterns of the Finnish textile company Marimekko and the whimsical fabrics of the Austrian-born architect Josef Frank.
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