He considered his finest work to be Midvinterblot (Midwinter Sacrifice), a large painting now displayed inside the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts.

[4] As a rule, each room was home to three families; "penury, filth and vice thrived there, leisurely seethed and smouldered, eaten-away and rotten bodies and souls.

Larsson portrays him as a loveless man lacking self-control; he drank, ranted and raved, and incurred the lifelong anger of his son after an outburst in which he declared, "I curse the day you were born".

[4] However, at the age of thirteen, his teacher at the school for poor children urged him to apply to the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, and he was admitted.

In the meantime, Larsson worked as a caricaturist for the humorous paper Kasper and as a graphic artist for the newspaper Ny Illustrerad Tidning.

Larsson was not eager to establish contact with the French progressive Impressionists; instead, along with other Swedish artists, he cut himself off from the radical movement of change.

[9] In 1888, the young family was given a small house named Lilla Hyttnäs at Sundborn just outside Falun in Dalarna by Karin's father Adolf Bergöö (1828–1890).

[12] While working on Midvinterblot (1915), a large decoration for the vestibule of the Nationalmuseum, Larsson experienced the onset of an eye problem and a worsening of his frequent headaches.

However, the print runs of these rather expensive albums did not come close to that produced in 1909 by the German publisher Karl Robert Langewiesche (1874–1931).

[17] In his memoirs Jag (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1931) – published after Larsson's death – he declared his bitterness and disappointment over this rejection of the painting he himself considered to be his greatest achievement: "The fate of Midvinterblot broke me!

Larsson admitted, however, in the same memoirs that the pictures of his family and home "became the most immediate and lasting part of my life's work.

"[This quote needs a citation] Fights between different schools of Swedish artists caused the "Midvinterblot" controversy to continue for many years.

Public appreciation changed the experts' view of the painting, and with the help of private donations the museum was able to buy it from Ishizuka in 1997 and permanently display it in the location for which it was intended.