Cartoon for the Fresco in the Lower Hall of the NM. The Art Academy: Taraval's Drawing School

Cartoon for the Fresco in the Lower Hall of the NM. The Art Academy: Taraval's Drawing School was made in 1895 as a preparatory study for one of Carl Larsson's monumental mural commissions for the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Guillaume Taraval (1701–1750) was a French-born artist who founded the Royal Drawing School in Stockholm — predecessor of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts — and who played a foundational role in establishing formal art education in eighteenth-century Sweden. Larsson's choice to depict this historical moment in art education for the lower hall of the Nationalmuseum was deliberate: the museum was Sweden's primary art institution, and a painting about the origins of Swedish art training was an appropriate decorative program for its public spaces. The preparatory cartoon (full-scale drawing or sketch) on canvas shows Larsson's working method for large commissions, translating initial compositional ideas into the final mural scale.

Oil on canvas as preparatory cartoon, with the composition worked out at or near final scale. The handling is less finished than the final mural would be — a working document rather than an exhibition piece — showing the compositional blocking and figure arrangement without the final refinements of color and surface.