FLAXEN-HAIRED children scampering over striped rag-rugs on scrubbed pine floors: such is the rustic idyll conjured up by the watercolours of Carl Larsson (1853-1919), one of Sweden's most renowned artists. His work also strikes a resounding contemporary note. The informal country lifestyle he depicted resembles that seen in so many magazines today. The Larsson exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum (until January 18th) shows both illustrations of and reconstructed interiors from his country home at Sundborn in central Sweden, as well as his neglected oil paintings. It is sponsored by Ikea, a Swedish furnishing chain, which has brought an updated version of the Larsson look to Europe's urban masses.

Larsson's country home was designed by him and his wife, Karin, as a snug retreat. Karin was a talented artist who, in the spirit of the times, sacrificed painting for domesticity, but later made stunningly original crafts for the house, anticipating the Bauhaus. Theirs soon became the best-publicised hideaway in northern Europe following the launch of “Ett Hem” (The Home), a collection of his watercolours with accompanying text in 1899.

The book was a bestseller in Scandinavia, Germany and the United States, though the British proved resistant—odd since the English Arts and Crafts Movement had been a strong influence. In it, Larsson exhorted his fellow artists to “carve tankards, doors and cupboards, storm the porcelain factories build your own houses.” This is what he and Karin did, extending the plain Sundborn cottage (a gift from Karin's father), painting some of the late 18th-century furniture white (in aristocratic Swedish style) but some of it in audacious, folk-inspired colours, covering sofas and chairs with blue-and-white-checked loose covers, installing tiled corner stoves, hanging Japanese prints and antique Swedish folk paintings on the walls. Karin's shocked aunt, used to the murky plushness of Stockholm's over-decorated drawing rooms, said that she would rather sleep in a prison cell than at Sundborn.

Like fellow artists Claude Monet at Giverny and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Larsson created a home that was radically elegant and pristine, much influenced by Japanese notions of space, a joy to live in. He slept in splendid isolation in a white-painted, four-poster bed (marooned in the centre of the room), festooned with white hangings starkly embroidered with geometric forms by Karin. She slept with her daughters in a cosy, cabin-like room next door. His powerfully linear watercolours portray home-life in all its swift intimacy: a glimpse of himself shaving at a mirror, mostly concealed by his massive, white bed; his infant daughters, rumpled, semi-naked among strewn-about toys in their bedroom.

Larsson's vision of domestic enchantment and tables groaning with delicious Swedish fare was in total contrast to his own childhood. His autobiography portrays his father tyrannising him in a verminous Stockholm slum. He often went hungry. Sometimes he could not believe his luck as an adult: happily married, blessed with many children, a successful artist living in a self-made paradise.

But in an intense oil self-portrait, “Self-Examination” (1896), Larsson depicted himself holding an insanely cheerful-looking doll in his hands; the lucid optimism of his works concealed a darker side. Great grief came when Karin and Carl's eldest son Ulf died from a burst appendix, aged 18. Illness, the obsessive focus of so much late 19th-century Scandinavian painting, appears in only one picture by Larsson. It shows Karin recovering from pneumonia in their Stockholm flat; the wan greys of the painted furniture match the plaintive listlessness of her look. August Strindberg later turned against his old friend Carl, claiming that his craft and character were based on a pack of mawkish lies. Larsson's big mystico-historical fantasies, a hit with Swedish Nazis, look simply dotty nowadays. But his domestic pictures and his country home (now one of Sweden's most popular attractions) have stood the test of time. They still look curiously impersonal and eternally sunny.