Carl Larsson

I'm labouring under my usual mid-summer melancholy at the moment, so I was looking for some art that would help me dispel or at least alleviate it.

I recalled a book of delightful watercolour illustrations by turn of the century Swedish artist Carl Larsson, which I had discovered a while ago in one of the many treasure-laden libraries at my parent's house and promptly "commandeered," so that it now rests in one of my own.

Here are some of the pictures:

Neat, cosy interiors, attractive children, art, blooms, pots, furniture, clean linen... The surface of an idyllic family life: the passing of days capturted in vivid colours and ordered compositions; life artfully transposed into something at once more and less than what it must have been.

These are not merely scenes of bourgeois bliss. There is something else looming in these rooms and about these well-loved figures caught in the light of summer: a sense of the painter's desire to hold on to them, and the viewer's poignant knowledge of his inevitable failure.