Carl Larsson

Carl Larsson was a Swedish painter and interior designer, representative of the Arts and Crafts Movement. His many paintings include oils, watercolors, and frescoes. Larsson's popularity increased considerably with the development of color reproduction technology in the 1890s, when the Swedish publisher Bonnier published books written and illustrated by Larsson and containing full color reproductions of his watercolors. However, the print runs of these rather expensive albums did not come close to that produced in 1909 by the German publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche. His choice of watercolors, drawings and text by Carl Larsson, titled Das Haus in der Sonne (The House in the Sun), immediately became one of the German publishing industry's best-sellers of the year - 40,000 copies sold in three months. Larsson also drew several sequential picture stories, thus being one of the earliest Swedish comic creators.