Midsummer's Day Dance

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.