Wood Carving
Midsummer in Dalarna: The Painted Horses of Nusnäs
In a lakeside village north of Stockholm, three carving families still shape and paint the Dala horse — the small red totem that has quietly become Sweden's national object.
There is a photograph, taken in 1939 at the New York World's Fair, of a two-metre Dala horse standing in front of the Swedish pavilion. Overnight the little red horse from a forest village in Dalarna became a national symbol. Nearly ninety years later, in the village of Nusnäs on Lake Siljan, three families — Olsson, Grannas and Jonsson — still carve every horse by hand.
June in Dalarna is a season of preparation. The Midsummer poles are being raised in every parish, and the workshops in Nusnäs are working double shifts to have stock ready for the tourists who will come off the boats in July.
Each horse begins as a block of local pine, felled the previous winter when the sap is low. A carver rough-shapes it in about eight minutes, then passes it to a second bench for sanding, dipping in red base coat, and finally to the painter, who applies the kurbits — the stylised floral saddle — in a sequence unchanged since the 1840s.
The kurbits pattern is regional. Nusnäs horses have a specific harness of white and yellow flourishes; nearby Risa carves a rounder-bodied horse with a green saddle. To a Dalarna eye, mixing them up is a small offence.
I spend an afternoon at Grannas A. Olssons Hemslöjd with Nils Olsson, 63, third-generation carver. He is teaching a summer apprentice — a Syrian-Swedish teenager from Borlänge — how to freehand the kurbits without a stencil. "The horse is very forgiving," Nils tells him gently. "The paint is not."
