Carl Larsson

Carl Larsson grew up poor in Stockholm's old town, with a father who drank heavily and offered him little, and painting became his way out — he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Arts at just thirteen. Years of illustration work and a frustrating stretch in Paris followed, without much success, until he joined a colony of Scandinavian painters at Grez-sur-Loing, where he switched from oil to watercolor and met his future wife, the artist Karin Bergöö.

In 1888, Karin's father gave the young family a small cottage at Sundborn in Dalarna. Carl and Karin rebuilt and repainted it together, room by room, and it became the actual subject of his best-known watercolors: his children reading, sewing, eating breakfast by a window he had designed himself. When the Swedish publisher Bonnier printed a color album of these scenes in the 1890s, and a German edition followed in 1909 that sold 40,000 copies in three months, the house at Sundborn became one of the most widely reproduced domestic interiors in Europe.

Larsson kept painting there until his death in 1919. Lilla Hyttnäs still stands in Sundborn today, furnished largely as he and Karin left it.