There are two portraits by Roy Anderson, both lovely, at the Museum.  I liked the fact that Mayan designs were painted suggestively in the backgrounds to enhance the origin of the dog’s breeding.

Words of Comfort by J Weir

Porcelain Pugs by Meissen

A Meissen Pug is one of the things I most covet as objet d”art.

Wire-Haired Fox Terriers

Salukis

Horse, Mastiff and Newfoundland by Arthur Batt 1881

Realisation by Arthur Wardle

Fox Terriers Chasing Butterflies by Arthur Wardle

Mastiff

Japanese Chins by Cleanthe Carr

I’m becoming familiar with some of the names of the most accomplished dog painters (besides Edwin Landseer, that is):  John Emms (English,  1864-1912), Maud Earl (English, 1864-1943), Arthur Wardle (English, 864-1949).   Note that these artists are all English.  “The influence which the Queen (Victoria) had on her subjects cannot be underestimated.  Her love of animals, her active support of animal causes and her great love of animal portraits, can only have served to instil similar interests in her subjects,” according to William Secord in Dog Painting:  A History of the Dog in Art.  I probably love dog paintings (and horse paintings as well) both because I love the animals, but because I also love things British.

Entrance Hall Alcove Sitting Room, Wightwick Manor

Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.  William Morris

I’ve been writing about the Arts and Crafts movement in Sweden, Finland and Great Britain, and I just found a wonderful synopsis of the philosophy by Stephen Calloway in the book, The Arts and Crafts Houses in Britain:

The great protagonists of the Arts and Crafts cause were in a real sense revolutionaries.  The artists, craftsmen, thinkers  and writers, architects and designers who initiated the movement in the second half of the nineteenth century and those who carried it forth into the twentieth shared an ideal of changing the world….That this revolution was to be entirely peaceful one does not mean that it’s aim was any less radical.  But this would be an uprising of makers, not destroyers; of artists and aesthetes, not iconoclasts.  These high-minded revolutionaries had no wish to pull down governments of rdepose kings.  They sought, however, nothing less than the overthrow of what they perceived to be an iniquitous social order, a system founded upon the exploitation and degradation of labour; a system based upon greed that filled the marketplace with shoddy goods and a commercial world that found the inevitable expression of its debased values in the ever-increasing ugliness of modern life. 

The desire of these revolutionaries was to bring about a new artistic and social order not by forcing change and innovation upon an uwilling public but, rather, by showing that there is a better way to live.  This improvement would be achieved, they believed, in large part, by a return to the old ways.  Their goal was to re-create a world in which beauty could again triumph over meanness, ugliness and utilitarian compromise.  By championing the old craft skills against the power of the machine, they aimed at the reversal of the inexorable and overwhelming trend of nineteenth-centruy “progress” towards the production of almost all everyday goods in soulless factory conditions.  The men and women of the Arts and Crafts movement sought, above all, to transform manufacture and thereby to change society, bringing content and delight to the rich man and the poor alike through the making of beautiful things.  In the joys of fine craftsmanship lay the answer to the besetting miseries of the age; all would achieve happiness, either as the reward of honest work or through living well in the possession of Beauty.

The quintessential expression of these lofty, but, as they fervently believed, universally applicable ideas lay in the creation of the “House Beautiful.”  Not surprisingly, this was an ideal most readily achievable by the rich, but it remained a concept that, at its most utopian, aimed at the improvement of not only the mansion of the wealthy p0atron but also the simple dwelling of the working man. 

The idea of a house fashioned, for those who could afford it, from top to bottom according to the vision and design of a single artist or architect waqs, of course, nothing new; in the early eighteenth century William Kent had been celebrated for the care that he bestowed upon devising the entire look of his projects, specifying everything from the the plan of the house and its every architectural flourish down to the shape of the chair or table, the fall of a drapery and the moulding of a picture frame.  Adam, Wyatt, Soane and other architects of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had revealed a similar genius for dictating the interior decoration, choosing colours and fabrics and designing the furniture for their houses.  But such architects held themselves aloof from their craftsmen and tradesmen, expecting them to follow design drawings and the written specifications of works to the letter…..

William Morris, the founding father of the Arts and Crafts and the tireless powerhouse of the erly days of the movement, was the first to approach the whole question of design and manufacture in a new way….Having fallen under the infulence of the Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter Dante Gabriedl Rossetti, and already in love with the literature and legend of the Middle Ages, Morris made the great intellectual leap of seeing in the art, the buildings and the craftsmanship of that distant era a viable model for reforming the ills of modern industrial society. 

To Morris and to other thinkers, such as John Ruskin, the impoverishment of the visual and material culture of the day appeared as the damning indictment of both the gross social inequalities and the creeping banality and imaginative impoverishment of the modern world.  The great answer, as Morris would argue over a period of forty years of ceaseless activity, lay in reversing the century’s headlong rush towards urbanisation, captialist trade, factory production and the division of labour, in favour of a return to ancient traditions of both work and social orgainisation.  The reform and salvation of the nineteenth century was. he suggested, to be achieved only by a return to the wholesome ideals of an earlier age.  Morris urged in particular the adoption of the ethos of the medieval guildsmen and master craftsmen.  These were men, Morris believed, who had pride in their skills and knew the value of fine materials.  They were, crucially, designer-makers who understood every process of their trade and took delight in the making of beautiful objects, simple in structure and adorned with meaningful ornament.  Working in this way, Morris hoped, workmen would once again be their own masters, employed by enlightened and honourable patrons; how could such men fail to take pride in their work and live fulfilling lives?

Morris and the others of his ilk didn’t manage to revolutionsize the values of their fellowmen, but they did manage to create houses, paintings, furniture, wallpaper, books and other items that were worth preserving and loving.  That is their legacy and I don’t think any artist can hope for more.

When I read this description of the Arts and Crafts inspiration, I identify it as an indictment of the American predilection for immediate profit, rather than even an intelligent evaluation of beauty ( since communities that preserve their better architecture attract more people than those that don’t),  the wisdom that knocks down homes of archtitectural significance in order to put up a fast-food shop or drug store, as has been done in my memory in Verona and Platteville.  Mineral Point remains a sort of oasis and I hope it goes on that way.  In the meantime, my spirit is with those Arts and Craftsmen, who worked at making beautiful things and hoped to inspire their fellowmen to do the same.

Last week I began re-perusing a book I’ve owned for some time called The World of Carl Larsson.  As I’d mentioned, I’d been drawn for years to the paintings Larsson did of his home and like many another person of Scandinavian origin, wanted to create a similar atmosphere in my own.  I had read that Larsson’s books, illustrated by his paintings, had revolutionized home decorating in his own day.  I can well believe it.  His home was filled with light:

The Flower Window

I’ve been reading about Carl and Karin out of interest, because they were both artists, wanting to know more about their collaboration.  Hans-Curt Koster writes (The World of Carl Larsson), “Karin no longer manifested herself artisitcally with her own artwork after 1884, the year Suzanne was born, so far as we know.  Her achievements in the field of textile art, which are to be seen mostly in Carl’s pictures from their home setting, stem almost all from after 1897.  But art historians are agreed that the creation of the Sundborn home, was chiefly if not practically exclusively the work of Karin, though Carl did have a hand in it.  It is also the prevailing opinion that Carl profited from Karin’s feel for color-effect.”

So, the Larsson home should more aptly be called the Karin Larsson Home.  As I have already mentioned, Carl and Karin met at a Swedish artists’ colony outside of Paris in the 1880s.  They were both painters.

I have learned by reading exerpts of The World…, that after he became Sweden’s most beloved artist, Carl was attacked and deeply hurt by critics in his later years.  This is not an unusual experience for anyone who achieves fame and becomes a role model.  The critic that probably packed the worst sting was a former champion of his, August Strindberg.  Strindberg had asserted in A Blue Book (1908), that “Carl and Karin Larsson, who at the time were the most celebrated family in Sweden, were merely putting on a show the whole time, were not revealing their true characters because the latter were diabolical and despicable, and especially that the Larsson domestic bliss, well-known throughout the kingdom, did not in reality exist — was just a lie.” (Strindberg’s assertion paraphrased byHans-Curt Koster)  A more recent critic, chiming in with Strindberg, alleges that “Carl and Karin were united only by hate-love and desire for notoriety.  Because Carl ‘forbade’ his wife to continue her work as an artist, she took revenge on him by forcing Carl to paint only what she had thought up.”  This latter is to comment on whether the Larsson paintings of their home and family life were the creations of them both or of Carl only.

Well, as Koster admits, it’s impossible to answer such critics definitively, since the Larssons, Strindberg and the whole pre-world war era is irrevocably gone, but it strikes me as highly unlikely that the two existed in a love-hate, ambition-driven dependency.

The fact that Carl Larsson had made his personal life the subject of his paintings, thereby creating an idyll, was undoubtedly due to the fact that the books, illustrated by his artwork, were well-received and liked.   We are the beneficiaries of his idyll.  But even after the public taste in art changed and Larsson became for many a paradigm of bourgeois complacency, at best irrelevant as a contemporary artist, and at worst, a hypocrite, he continued to paint happy pictures of his home life.

I see Larsson as faithful to his vision.  He wrote, “For life is, indeed, dreadful.  Each one makes the best he can of it but if one of us sometimes has something so bearable, yes, happy,…he can not help seeing side-by-side with himself…angry..individuals….One beast torments and devours the other, one flower stifles and kills the other…For many years you have been happy to call you best friend your own and then he turns his face against you — that is hellish….That is life….But we must, in order not to despair, keep saying encouraging things to ourselves and saying: “Nice weather we’re having today!‘

Larsson consciously made himself the the apostle of domestic happiness.  He had had the opposite experience of childhood and family himself.  His father had abandoned the family to poverty and struggle in a slum, surrounded by every kind of vice and evil.  That was Carl’s memory of it.  He, on the other hand, having married the right woman — and who can contest that marrying a person who will build you up, rather than tear you down, is one of the foundations of a successful life — was determined to create something else.  Koster writes that in the moment of Carl’s and Karin’s falling in love, they had been painting together.  Carl had experienced a revelation, in his words:  “And then we both painted Mere Morot.  And the scales fell from my eyes!  I had up to now not brought my so called talent into any kind of form, but now I had immediately succeeded with a little masterpiece, I think, because I got a medal for that picture.”  Koster goes on, “The moment when the ‘scales fell from his eyes’ had been for Carl Larsson definitely the most important thing in his life as an artist.  This moment could have been of equally great importance for Karin, who together with him had painted Mere Morot.  She wrote later to her parents that she had never felt so safe, so calm and so strong at the same time so devoted as now.”  Koster concludes, “This shared creative intoxication was probably sought again and again by the two, and in my opinion it is only natural if Carl and Karin shared in creating the subsequent Larsson pictures.”

I will not comment on the facts of nature, that women bear children and men don’t, which has been forever the reason women’s talents have rarely had the opportunity to be honed to the degree men’s have.  This was no doubt at work in Carl and Karin’s relationship.  However, I do not find it hard at all to believe in relative domestic bliss.  Way back in 1994, when the movie version of Little Women, starring Winona Ryder and Christian Bale, was released, having a chance conversation with someone in a doctor’s waiting room.  The (younger) woman told me she “despised the movie, because no one’s life was so sweet and cloying.”  My response was only, “Ummmmmm…..”  Frankly, such a wholesome family experience was completely famiiar to me, probably more banal and less story-worthy, but when I looked about myself, at my own life and that of my friends’, I didn’t find Little Women particularly unrealistic.  (Louisa May Alcott had really wanted to write thrillers and gothic novels about murder and romance, not a novel extolling virtue and personal growth.)  It’s certainly an edited version of Victorian life, but I think the spirit that pervades it is a completely valid human idealism.

Human idealism, a penchant for turning to the wholesome and upbuilding, is as valid as anything darker.  It is a real part of the spectrum of human experience, especially if one is determined to choose it over despair and bitterness.

Just a Sip?

I’ve had this print hanging in my kitchen for years.  It shows the Larssons preparing for a card party and guests.

Lisbeth Playing the Wicked Princess

The Crayfish Season Opens

We had just such family picnics at Rabbit Lake (Aitkin, MN) on Midsummers’ Day when I was a child.

Breakfast under the Big Birch

My grandmother had a special fondness for a large birch at their family farm in Lappajarvi, Finland.  She came from a family of many sisters and brothers.  This painting has always reminded me of her childhood.

My Grandmother and Uncle Unto under the Big Birch

I know this photo needs photoshopping badly, but I don’t happen to have Photoshop right now.

Carl and Karin's Cottage

Who wouldn’t want to stay here?