Archives: Persephone Post

‘Karin was Carl Larsson’s muse. So thoughtful and quiet, he portrayed her as his idol, forever young. She was, in fact, hard-working, hard headed and highly creative. Carl relied upon her as a critic of his work. She trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and Paris. After the birth of Suzanne in 1884 she turned her artistry to decorating the home, especially to weaving and embroidery. She also designed furniture and her own and her children’s clothes. Her most creative period was between 1900 and 1910. Karin’s textiles were absolutely original. Pre-modern in character they introduced a new abstract style in tapestry. Her bold compositions were executed in vibrant colours; her embroidery frequently used stylised plants. In black and white linen she reinterpreted Japanese motifs. Technically adventurous, she explored folk techniques and experimented with others. At Sundborn the Larssons developed an aesthetic partnership. The colours of the interior seem to have been jointly decided. Their combined contributions created a perfect whole” (adapted from the V and A book p. 169). The ‘Sunflower’ cushion dates from 1905 and was designed for the centre of the dining room sofa.

The other day in the office Carl Larsson was mentioned and Lydia and Rosie looked a bit blank. Even though he was on the Post in May of last year (the 14th-18th). This lacuna must be remedied! On the Post this week – Karin Larsson. She was a painter in her own right, a huge influence on and supporter of her husband Carl. Nowadays in fact it is she who is credited with creating ‘the Swedish style’ – and all of her painting and decorating and ‘styling’  (but of course her style was instinctive) happened while bringing up the children and running the house, the famous house Lilla Hyttnas at Sundborn which is now open to the public (cf. the website here). It was given to them in 1888 as a summer house and became their permanent home in 1901. ‘The old plain house was turned into an elaborately designed and decorated summer retreat redolent of the virtuous (and pre-industrial) Swedish past, its style combining elements of folk and “Viking” design with the more elegant Gustavian taste of the late eighteenth century while also being completely modern. But Lilla Hyttnas was more than just architecture and decoration, it was a whole way of life, informal and family centred… After the publication of the Ett hem (A Home) watercolours the Larssons’ vision of summer came to be adopted by the whole of Sweden’ (p. 3 Carl and Karin Larsson published by the V & A in 1997 to coincide with a Larsson exhibition).

Our third book this October is One Woman’s Year (1953) by Stella Martin Currey. It consists of funny and useful essays on domestic life, recipes, quotations, extracts from favourite books and woodcuts and provides a great insight into 1950s life. How much easier some things were and how much more difficult others!

A Room of One’s Own naturally has a contemporan-eous design by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. Notice that the pink is deeper in the top left hand corner – and varies over the page. This design was not made into a fabric until last year, when a small company (WeLoveCushions) in the UK started making cushions, lampshades and deck chair out of it. We shall be selling these in the shop.

And now for the three fabrics. This is for Expiation by Elizabeth von Arnim: such an extraordinary book – about a woman who is cut out of her husband’s will because he had discovered she had been ‘sinning’ every Wednesday afternoon. It is funny and perceptive and yet, like all great novels, has more than a touch of profundity.

This is Stella Martin Currey, author of One Woman’s Year. It’s a crunch week for the PB, with all three of us working on it before Friday’s deadline. And changes are made up to the last minute – so this lovely photograph may not make the final cut. But of course it will be online in the authors’ page.

The new Biannually goes to the printer on Friday so this week on the Post some glimpses of what it will contain when your copy arrives (around October 22nd). This is the cover: a portrait of Rosanagh Crichton Convalescing in Bed by Rex Whistler dated 2nd July 1938.

A week of brilliant women; all of whom could have had at least a week each of the Post to themselves. Finally here is Mabel Pryde Nicholson (1871-1918) who is perhaps the most intrguing of them all. Here Tim Cornwell writes: “Pryde was the youngest of seven children, daughter of Dr David Pryde, Chairman of the Edinburgh Pen and Pencil Club and headmaster of Edinburgh Ladies’ College. Her father insisted that the failure to educate girls was ‘one of the great calamities of the human race’; her mother was said to be a domestic despot. In a wild family, she was described careering along the garden walls of Edinburgh on stilts. Reflected, perhaps, in the sturdy faces looking out of her paintings.” She persuaded her father to let her attend art school when she was seventeen and it was there that she met the painter William Nicholson (1872-1949) whom she married in 1893 without her parents’ permission. Prydie, as she was known, appears in the portrait of her (now much more famous relatives) ‘The Bloomsbury Family‘ by William Orpen: she is a (shrunken-faced and slightly haunted?) figure in the background of the family scene.  Above is ‘The Grange, Rottingdean’ which shows two of her four children; Annie ‘Nancy’ Nicholson (1899–1978), the textile artist who married the poet Robert Graves in 1918. And in the background is the architect Christoper ‘Kit’ Nicholson (1904-48) who married another textile designer, EQ Nicholson (nee Myers), who designed ‘Black Goose’ used for the endpaper in PB 14, Farewell Leciester Square.

Anne Redpath (1895-1965) was at the ECA during WWI and then moved to France with her husband, the architect James Beattie Michie, in 1920 where she took a break from painting to raise their three sons. They moved back to Britain in the mid-1930s, leading increasingly separate lives. The 1940s was a period of intense productivity for Redpath; she moved back to Edinburgh and created Post Impressionist still lifes. Her  ‘The Indian Rug (Red Slippers)’, 1942, shows, for example, the influence of Matisse (the red stool and slippers here surely an homage to his 1908 masterpeiece  ‘The Red Room‘).

Beatrice Huntington (1889-1988) was a celebrated protrait painter in the 1920s and 30s. She grew up in St Andrews and trained in Paris, Munich and London (and studied the cello in Leipzig). She moved to Dundee after WWI to study under the painter William Macdonald whom she married in 1925. They moved to a flat on Hanover Street, Edinburgh in 1929 and lived there for the rest of their lives. They travelled extensively throughout Europe, particularly in Spain which is reflected in the subject of  this twenties painting ‘A Muleteer from Andalucia’. Alice Strang, editor of Modern Scottish Women writes ‘It comes from a series of works which reveal an awareness of Cubism’ presumably from her training in Paris. ‘The faceted handling of the sitter’s face and the overall austerity of design, seen in the plain background and the flattened depiction of the hat and jacket, illustrate Huntington’s declaration that “simplification is not omitting, it is containing and that comes with knowledge and hard work.”‘