Christmas Eve Feast

Carl Larsson, the man and his work, was a Swedish national treasure. I have come to treasure his work as well, and in the coming year will feature a number of his beautiful images. Much of his work involved and revolved around family and community, featuring an idyllic simplicity that many of us long for in these complex and overwhelming times. His compositions were 'photographic' in the sense that many of his scenes look like snapshots, casual captures of family and friends involved in simple pleasures of well-lived lives.

Larsson had recorded that all he wanted was to make people happy with his work, and for the most part he did, though he went through some troubling times himself. So until the weeks ahead where I will feature a spectrum of warmth and charm imbued in his work, here is some warmth and charm of his depiction of a Christmas Eve feast, not in some nostalgic distant time (as indeed we view it), but from his time and home in Sundborn, Sweden.

Carl Larsson — Christmas Eve — ca 1904