The Gate. From A Home (26 watercolours)

The Gate is one of twenty-six watercolors Carl Larsson created for his celebrated book Ett Hem (A Home), published in 1899 and depicting the artist's family home at Sundborn in Dalarna, Sweden. The series became one of the most influential artistic projects in Scandinavian cultural history, shaping Swedish concepts of domestic interior design and family life for generations and informing the international Arts and Crafts movement. Larsson and his wife Karin, a gifted textile designer, had transformed their Sundborn house into a living total-work of art, combining bright colors, folk craft traditions, and cheerful informality in a deliberate rejection of the heavy Victorian bourgeois interior. The gate — threshold between domestic sanctuary and the world outside — is a charged subject in a series dedicated to the home as an artistic and moral achievement.

Larsson's distinctive watercolor style combines confident, clean line drawing with flat washes of clear, luminous color. The influence of Japanese woodblock composition is evident in flattened spatial effects and decorative line.