The Awakening

The Awakening, painted in 1906, belongs to the series of intimate morning or waking scenes that Zorn produced at Mora in the first decade of the twentieth century. The subject of a figure at the moment of waking — between sleep and consciousness, between night and day — offered Zorn the opportunity to study a figure in an utterly unguarded state, the body relaxed and the face free of social performance. The theme had roots in the long Western tradition of depicting sleeping or waking figures, from Giorgione's Sleeping Venus through Courbet's frank naturalism, but Zorn's treatment is characteristically Swedish in its directness and lack of mythological pretension. The warm light of an interior bedroom or the cool light of an early morning window would have provided the specific illumination conditions he needed to study a figure in transition from horizontal repose to vertical awareness, a transition rich in the subtle postural and tonal shifts that made such moments valuable to a painter of his sensitivity.

Oil on canvas with Zorn's direct, tactile brushwork suited to a domestic interior scene. The quality of morning light — possibly entering from a single window — establishes the tonal key, and the figure's relaxed form is built up through rapid, descriptive strokes that capture both mass and movement.