The Art of Sculpture: Carl Michael Bellman in Sergel's studio. Cartoon for the Fresco in the Lower Hall of the NM

This large preparatory cartoon was made by Carl Larsson in 1895 for one of the monumental fresco cycles he painted in the entrance hall of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm — a commission that occupied much of his mature career. The fresco program celebrated Swedish cultural history, and this panel depicts the poet and troubadour Carl Michael Bellman posing in the studio of the sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel, two of the most celebrated figures of eighteenth-century Swedish cultural life. Bellman, famous for his songs of Stockholm street life, and Sergel, the neoclassical sculptor, were contemporaries who moved in the same courtly and bohemian circles. Larsson's choice to depict the act of artistic creation — sculpture specifically — within the broader allegory of Swedish art's history gave the Nationalmuseum commission a self-referential quality, celebrating the very institution housing the work. The cartoon format, worked out at near-final scale before transfer to the wall, reveals Larsson's careful compositional thinking and his ability to move fluidly between his well-known domestic watercolor intimacy and the grander demands of monumental public painting.

Executed in oil on canvas as a full-scale preparatory study, the work demonstrates Larsson's controlled draftsmanship and his ability to adapt his characteristic flat, decorative line to a larger format. The compositional arrangement shows academic training, balancing figural groups across a well-lit interior space with careful attention to sculptural props.