Sanctuary Paintings in Dalarna’s Free Churches, 1850s–2000s

Abstract

Nearly 25 years after their founding, in 1903 the Swedish nonconformist congregation in Söderås, a small village outside the town of Rättvik in Dalarna, decided to extend and decorate their wood-framed church. While the builders worked on enlarging the sanctuary, a local painter Kers Lars Larsson was commissioned to decorate the interior. By the time the work was finished, Larsson had covered the walls and ceiling of the entire church with patterned detailing, Christian symbolism and, most spectacularly, a series of brightly-coloured tableaux taken from the life of Christ. While the Söderås interior is now a protected national heritage, many other so-called “free” churches, products of the evangelical revival which had spread across Sweden in the 1850s, also decorated their interiors in this way, not always so elaborately, but always with a colourful figurative painting which was affixed to the wall behind the pulpit. Little scholarly attention, however, has been paid to the Swedish free church interior and in particular to the presence and meaning of this widespread practice of interior painting. This article argues that these images are part of process of revitalization, that they emerge during a moment of “crisis” the turning point when a congregation decides to build something new or to renovate and redecorate the old, to renew their existing cultural system.