Anders Zorn
Mora, 1860 - 1920, Mora
(b Mora, 18 Feb 1860; d Mora, 22 Aug 1920).
Swedish painter, etcher and sculptor. He was brought up by his grandparents at Mora. As he displayed a precocious talent for drawing he was admitted to the preparatory class of the Kungliga Akademi för de Fria Konsterna, Stockholm, at the age of 15. Dissatisfied with the outdated teaching and discipline of the Academy and encouraged by his early success as a painter of watercolour portraits and genre scenes (e.g. Old Woman from Mora, 1879; Mora, Zornmus.) Zorn left the Academy in 1881 to try to establish an international career. He later resided mainly in London but also travelled extensively in Italy, France, Spain, Algeria and the Balkans and visited Constantinople. However, he continued to spend most of his summers in Sweden.
Anders Zorn: Frances Folsom Cleveland, oil on canvas, 1370?920 mm,...In 1887–8 Zorn more or less abandoned watercolour and turned to oil painting, and he settled in Paris, where he remained until 1896. Here he began to gain international recognition thanks partly to his portraits and partly to his pictures of nudes (e.g. Une Première, 1888; Stockholm, Nmus., and Out of Doors, 1888; Göteborg, Kstmus.) (see fig.). Zorn adopted the innovative practice of painting nudes en plein air. The virtuoso technique that he had developed in his watercolours was to some extent carried over to his oil paintings, where the broad, free handling of the brush illustrates his admiration for Edouard Manet. During the 1890s his work displayed an increasingly strong feeling for the body’s plasticity, reminiscent of Auguste Renoir. However, Zorn, like Sargent and his good friend Max Liebermann (whose portrait Zorn painted in 1891; Mora, Zornmus.), belonged to the moderate modernist phalanx who adopted features not only from Impressionism and Japonisme but also from the fashionable art of the salon. Zorn was also inspired to an increasing extent by the Old Masters that he studied in the Louvre, particularly Titian, Velázquez and Rembrandt.
Anders Leonard Zorn: Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (Virginia Purdy, died...Zorn’s works are generally carefully composed and executed, but he strove to produce in them a feeling of improvisation by the use of lively brush work and by creating the impression of having captured the subject at a given moment. Zorn’s skill and expertise, in particular, in giving his portrait models an elegant and worldly aspect, secured him a wide range of patrons throughout the world. This was especially the case in the USA, where he went for the first time in 1893 as commissioner for the Swedish art section at the Chicago World Fair, and where he returned many times. Some of his renowned American portraits are those of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1894; Boston, MA, Isabella Stewart Gardner Mus.), of William Howard Taft (1911; Washington, DC, White House) and of other American presidents, politicians, financiers and society ladies (e.g. Mrs. Potter Palmer, 1893; Chicago, IL, A. Inst. and Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon, 1897; New York, Met.). His Self-portrait with Model (1896; Stockholm, Nmus.) displays the same kind of candidness in composition and execution, as well as his interest in the depiction of light.
From 1896 Mora, the place where Zorn grew up, became his permanent home, although he still made numerous journeys abroad. He built a grand house completed in 1913 in an ‘Old Nordic’ style, which contains his collections of art and handicrafts (now the Zorn Museum). Zorn actively encouraged the revival of traditional local customs, arts and crafts, which were being threatened by industrialization and urbanization. Many of his paintings also had motifs from Dalecarlian folklore, among them Midsummer Dance (1897; Stockholm, Nmus.). Zorn said of this painting: ‘I regard this work as containing all my deepest feelings’, and it has become one of the major pictorial expressions of Swedish National Romanticism. It shows peasants from the Mora district, who, having erected a tall pole decorated with flowers and greenery, dance under the stars until sunrise. It reveals Zorn’s interest in capturing the particular atmosphere of the light Nordic summer nights, for in order to render the opalescent light, which casts no shadows, Zorn painted Midsummer Dance after sunset in June and July. He succeeded in depicting the enchantment and exuberance of a night devoted to celebrating the return of light after the long northern winter. In such works Zorn provided a transition from the optimistic naturalism of the 1880s to the vitalist currents that marked the early years of the 20th century in Scandinavian art, and he was in general untouched by the Symbolist-inspired, melancholic and nostalgic tones of its art of the 1890s.
Zorn’s watercolour studies (many of which are in Mora, Zornmus.) remain some of his most brilliant and spontaneous works. Zorn was also skilled as an etcher, and a number of his 288 etchings reproduce his oil paintings. Zorn started etching in England in 1882 and developed a virtuoso technique, much inspired by his admiration for Rembrandt and quite impressionistic in character. His best-known prints are from his Parisian period, for example the portraits of Rosita Maura (1889; e.g. Lawrence, U. KS, Spencer Mus. A.) and Ernest Renan (1892; e.g. Chicago, IL, A. Inst.). Zorn’s sculptures also reveal his strong feeling for plasticity (which became more and more apparent in his oils from the middle of the 1890s). Although he had made wood-carvings in his youth he did not begin sculpting seriously until 1889, and he left rather few works, mostly small bronze figurines (e.g. Fawn and Nymph, h. 170 mm, 1895; Stockholm, Nmus.). His only monumental work is the statue of Gustavo's Vasa in Mora (1903), which portrays the subject with an uplifted head and a strong inspired expression and whose sense of naturalness and candidness resembles the painted portraits. Zorn’s autobiographical notes, written between 1907 and 1914, were published in 1982.
Writings
H. H. Bummer, ed.: Självbiografiska anteckningar [Autobiographical notes] (Stockholm, 1982)
Bibliography
L. Delteil: Anders Zorn, Le Peintre-graveur illustré, 4 (Paris, 1909)
G. Boëthius: Anders Zorn, an International Swedish Artist: His Life and Work (Stockholm, 1954)
G. Boëthius: Zorn, Swedish Painter and World Traveller (Stockholm, 1959/R 1961)
Zorn: Paintings, Graphics and Sculpture (exh. cat., ed. H. H. Brummer; Birmingham, Mus. & A. G., 1986)
Anders Zorn, 1860–1920: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Radierungen (exh. cat., ed. J. C. Jensen; Kiel, Christian-Albrechts U., Ksthalle, 1989; Munich, Ksthalle Hypo-Kultstift.; 1990)
Från två hav: Zorn och Sorolla [From two seas: Zorn and Sorolla] (exh. cat., ed. B. Sandström; Stockholm, Nmus., 1991–2)
Swedish Impressionism’s Boston Champion: Anders Zorn and Isabella Stewart Gardner (exh. cat. by M. Facos, Boston, MA, Isabella Stewart Gardner Mus., 1993)
H. H. Brummer: Till ögats fröjd och nationens förgyllning—Anders Zorn [For the eye’s delight and the nation’s gilding—Anders Zorn] (Stockholm, 1994)
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