Anders Zorn

Anders Zorn (1860–1920) was a Swedish painter, etcher, and sculptor who became one of the most internationally celebrated Scandinavian artists of his generation, renowned for his dazzling technical virtuosity, his monumental nude paintings, and his penetrating portraits of the wealthy and powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in Mora, Dalarna, the illegitimate son of a brewer's daughter, he trained at the Stockholm Academy and first made his reputation with watercolour paintings of Venice and Istanbul. Moving to oil from the late 1880s, he developed a handling of paint of almost unprecedented bravura — his brushwork is among the most physically exciting in the history of European painting. Our Daily Bread (1886), The Bride (1886), and The Bathers (1889) established his international reputation. He painted three American presidents — Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt — and the cream of American Gilded Age society, becoming the fashionable portraitist of Chicago and New York. His nude paintings — the great outdoor bathing scenes set in the Dalarna countryside, girls bathing in forest streams — combine technical virtuosity with a frank sensuality. He returned to Mora in 1896 and spent the rest of his life there, documenting Swedish folk life and culture.

Zorn's handling of oil paint is among the most brilliant in nineteenth-century art — loose, gestural, supremely confident brushwork that captures light on wet skin, the shimmer of water, the specific quality of summer sunlight in northern Sweden with breathtaking economy of means. His palette is warm and luminous, built from a limited range of pigments applied with maximum impact. His portraits share the same physical energy: sitters emerge from the canvas with irresistible life.

Zorn was the most internationally celebrated Scandinavian painter of his generation and arguably the greatest technical virtuoso in the history of Swedish art. His portraits of three American presidents and the American social elite placed Swedish art at the pinnacle of international prestige. His nude paintings are among the most ambitious and technically extraordinary figure paintings of the late nineteenth century. He remains the most popular artist in Swedish cultural memory.