this branch of art to try
painting again in Paris, but with almost no success until the Spring of
1883, when he exhibited at the Salon a couple of small water-colors, the
subjects taken from the field and garden life of Grez, a little painting
village that lies south of the Fontainebleau forest. These pictures won a
medal and were bought in Gothenburg. Other similar subjects followed, all
distinguished, Nordensvan affirms, by the same pleasing delicacy of
handling, the same glow and splendor of sunlight, and the same glad
color-harmony. He now was in a position to marry, and pictures of family
life presently appeared in great numbers. These are altogether
charming--spirited, vivid, original, and full of an indescribable
freshness and heartiness. Sometimes he painted his young wife holding her
baby, sometimes he painted his two boys parading as mimic soldiers;
sometimes it was his little girl hiding under the great, handsome
dining-table; or a young people's party in the characteristic
dining-room, all the furniture and decorations of which are reproduced
with crisp naturalism.

Not the least charm of his paintings lies in the beauty of these
handsome interiors in which detail has the precise definition found in
the work of the old Dutch artists. While Larsson's technique lacks the
exquisite finish of a Terborch or Vermeer of Delft he tells almost as
many truths about a house and its occupants as they do. If we consider,
for example, the charming composition which he calls "The Sluggard's
Melancholy Breakfast" ("Sjusofverskans dystra frukost") we find worthy
of note not only the pensive and rather cross little girl sitting alone
at the table with her loaf of bread and cup of milk, but also the long
tablecloth with its handsome conventional design, obviously a bit of
artistic handicraft since it is signed and dated above the fringe at one
end, the decoration on the wall, possibly the lower part of a painted
window, with its significant motto "Arte et Probitate"; the graceful
pattern of the chairs, the big pitcher full of flowers and fruits, the
plain ample dishes, the polished floor of the passage-way at the end of
which a door opens on the green fields with a child's figure half-seen
standing on the threshold, the fine rich color harmony of greens and
reds and blues and browns held together by a subtlety of tone that
involves no loss of strength.

His outdoor scenes are hardly less personal in their portraiture. There