What a wonderful thing it must be for an artist to have his own farm and a horse and pigs and chickens."" So Carl Larsson, the watercolorist who lovingly recorded the interiors of his country cottage in A Home (1974), purchased the farm next door chiefly for the opportunity to recreate it in paintings. The farm, Spadarvet, was worked by a tenant family--Johan, Johanna, and little Esbjorn, and two hired hands Backstrom and Tekla--and Rudstrom's text, again divided between an easy narrative and long explanatory captions, tells how they labored with a combination of old-time hand methods and new, turn-of-the-century farm machinery. Perhaps because Larsson wasn't working the land himself, his farm scenes are all luminous clarity, delicate color, and graceful, rhythmic line. One misses here both the robustness of William Kurelek's mid-west panoramas and the personal absorption of Larsson's own interiors, where his ideas about design were an integral part of the subject and where his methods were discussed in Rudstrom's commentary. But if this oversize picture album fails to satisfy on as many levels as its predecessor, it's nevertheless a fine example of illustration from a period whose aesthetic still epitomizes the idyllic, innocent dream of rural life. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.