A Studio Idyll. The Artist's Wife and their Daughter

A Studio Idyll: The Artist's Wife and Their Daughter (1885) captures Carl Larsson and his wife Karin at an early stage of what would become their celebrated family life at Sundborn. Larsson had met Karin Bergöö in 1882 at the Grez-sur-Loing colony, where she was also working as an artist; they married in 1883 and their first children were born in the mid-1880s. This 1885 watercolour is among the earliest images of the family domestic world that Larsson would spend the following decade systematically depicting. The 'idyll' of the title sets the tone: this is self-consciously presented as an ideal scene of artistic domesticity, the studio as a site of both professional and personal happiness. By 1885 Larsson had shifted from oil to watercolour as his primary medium, and the bright, luminous quality of the new medium is evident.

Watercolour on paper — Larsson's newly adopted primary medium showing its characteristic luminosity and precision. The combination of his linear clarity with transparent washes allows simultaneous description of space, surface, and light. The subject — a woman and child in a domestic interior — is handled with the intimate directness that would become the hallmark of the Sundborn series.