ZORN, Anders

The Swedish painter Zorn was a visitor to Venice thanks in part to his friendship with Isabella Stewart Gardner, tenant of Palazzo Barbaro. His fluid, painterly style and sensual subjects were perfectly adapted to the kind of bourgeois and salon taste that marked the pre-Great War Venice Biennales.

George Peabody Gardner (1855-1939) was known in Boston for his philanthropic activities as well as his financial successes.

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.

Zorn’s watercolour studies remain some of his most brilliant and spontaneous works.

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.

Zorn was also skilled as an etcher, and a number of his 288 etchings reproduce his oil paintings. He 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. The etching version of the present portrait is in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

The virtuosity of the etchings of Anders Zorn, Swedish painter, sculptor and engraver with a prodigious international career, was immediately greatly appreciated and in much demand due to the scenographic effects of light and shadow, including spectacular use of light and shade and a dense network of marks that are characteristic of his graphic style, which owes a lot to the methods of James McNeill Whistler. With expert, poetic use of light, the artist has been able to give his own prints a vitality and intensity of emotion that is very different from the conventions in vogue for the stereotypical female figures of his Parisian contemporaries.

Like many etchings by the artist, this is an extraordinary interpretation, in the smaller size of a sheet, of one of his painted portraits (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco).

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’s Day Dance (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm).

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.

This portrait was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1897. It represents Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (Virginia Purdy, died 1919), the wife of the president of B&O Southwestern Railroad.