He was known for his ability to see through his models, and he liked to paint them in their own setting, with their favourite objects, like books or an easel, rather than in a studio. Zorn met his wife Emma Lamm when he was painting a portrait of her nephew in Stockholm, and it was through her family that he came into contact with the international elite.Īlthough European aristocrats, famous artists and American presidents paid record sums for his portraits, he did not portray them as any better than they were in reality. He eventually specialised in portraits, which became particularly popular among the upper classes in the United States. Zorn started painting in watercolours, and later moved to oils. After training at the art academy in Stockholm he took a ‘grand tour’ through Europe, which gave him a taste for travel, and he subsequently lived in London and Paris. He grew up in a poor family, with no father. His life began in 1860 in Mora, a small town in the Dalarna region of Sweden. Though there is no mechanism to zoom, if you drag the images to your desktop, you will find that they are high-resolution, allowing you to marvel at Zorn’s wonderful brushwork.2020 is the centenary of the death of Anders Zorn. It is worth noting that the images previewed on the National Academy website open somewhat enlarged in a pop-up when clicked on. See also my previous Lines and Colors post on Anders Zorn. The smattering of examples here don’t begin to do justice to the depth of Zorn’s oeuvre, I will try to follow up with a more general post on Zorn with additional images and resources. There is a review by James Gurney on his always superb blog, Gurney Journey, where you can also find an article on the fascinating topic of the “ Zorn palette“. The retrospective now at the National Academy features over 90 works and will be on view until May 18, 2014.Īn exhibition catalog has been published: Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter. Zorn was also a superb watercolorist and a master etcher, perhaps my third favorite after Rembrandt and Whistler. Recently, in particular, there have been notable shows of Zorn’s work at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2013, and in an exhibition titled Anders Zorn: Sweden’s Master Painter, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it recently ended its run at the Legion of Honor, that is now on view at the National Academy Museum in New York. Of late, his star has risen, much as Sargent’s has in the last 20 years or so, and more attention is being paid to Zorn’s painterly mastery of portrait and figurative subjects. Zorn is well known in his native country, and though highly regarded in 19th century European society as a portrait artist who rivaled, and competed with, Sargent, he has not been as well known to the world in general over the past century. Of the three, Zorn is unjustly much less well known than Sargent and Sorolla (and to their number I would add the also unfairly discounted American painter Cecilia Beaux, but that’s another story). This is a group that should be the definition when you look up the word “painterly”. (See my posts here on Lines and Colors on John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla.) Aficionados of the genre, and I certainly count myself one, will sometimes refer to a triumvirate of painters as “Masters of the Loaded Brush”: John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida and Anders Zorn.
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