About this work
*Skalorna* — known in English as *Playing Scales* — announces itself through a single, concentrated act: a child seated at a fortepiano or spinet, hands on keys, running through the tedious, essential repetitions that every young musician knows. The original Swedish title is *Skalorna*, and WikiArt classifies the work as a genre painting in the Art Nouveau (Modern) style , with tags confirming the presence of a child, a pianist, and a keyboard instrument. As in so many of Larsson's interior scenes, the room itself is as much a subject as the figure within it — the warm, flat planes of colour, the crisp outline work, and the decorative surfaces of Lilla Hyttnäs, the Larssons' mutual art project in which their artistic talents found expression in a very modern and personal architecture, colour scheme and interior design , all pressing close around the absorbed child. The eye moves between the small, intent figure and the carefully observed instrument, the whole scene suffused with the particular stillness of disciplined practice.
Larsson's family had become his favourite models, and many of the interiors depicted were the work of Karin Larsson, who also worked as an interior designer, at their house Lilla Hyttnäs at Sundborn just outside Falun in Dalarna, which Carl and Karin decorated and furnished according to their particular artistic taste. By 1905, Larsson was at the height of his domestic watercolour output — *Ett hem* (A Home) had already been published in 1899 to wide acclaim, and his popularity had increased considerably with the development of colour reproduction technology, with Swedish publisher Bonnier publishing books with full colour reproductions, and German publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche producing one of the German publishing industry's best-sellers of the year. *Playing Scales* belongs to this fertile period: quieter and more intimate than the famous group compositions, it zeroes in on a single moment of childhood routine and elevates it through Larsson's unerring compositional instinct and his signature Art Nouveau line.
The quality of the light, Karin's liberated gift for interior design and the lively family life depicted in Carl's beloved watercolours has become almost synonymous with our picture of Sweden
