Fish are biting!

The museum’s own note on it begins with the brushwork: Napp, it writes, is perhaps the oil painting where the painter’s touch comes closest to that of his watercolours, and an example of how imaginative Rococo pastiche and open-air naturalism need not exclude one another. Carl Larsson painted it in 1885 out of the delight in the eighteenth century that also produced his illustrations to Anna Maria Lenngren’s Samlade skaldeförsök — a commission from the publisher Albert Bonnier on which he was working at Grez-sur-Loing in 1883–84. Grez, the small painters’ village south of Paris, became his home during his Paris years, and it was there that he found his own style and made the watercolour his speciality — the medium of the idyllic family subjects that later earned him his place as, by common consent, the most beloved of Swedish painters. He was married to the artist Karin Larsson, and the home the two made at Sundborn in Dalarna became one of the most familiar images in Swedish art, reproduced and carried abroad in the books of their own house. The picture, painted on a wooden panel rather than canvas and measuring 32.5 × 41 cm, was given to the museum in 1991. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.