A long wooden table is set out on the grass in the shade of a birch tree, beside a red-painted house. Boys in caps and girls in bonnets sit along a bench with their backs to us, a woman in a dark hat sits at the far end, and a yellow dog waits by the table. The birch trunk at left is carved with hearts and the initials C K. Carl Larsson painted the watercolor in 1895 at Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn, the house his family had moved into in 1889.

It became a plate in Ett hem (A Home), a book of his paintings and text published by Albert Bonnier in Stockholm in 1899. There he wrote that on sunny summer days the family ate behind the house under the big birch, and called it the very best of everything. His wife Karin designed the home's furniture and textiles. The Carl Larsson-gården museum calls A Home groundbreaking: it inspired a new view of home decoration and family life and made Larsson beloved around the world.

After his copyright expired in 1969 the pictures were reproduced in mass editions, often in poor color, which the museum says still fulfilled his wish for art to reach ordinary people. It is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.