International studio (48.1913)

Anders Zorn

brought himself into prominence at the close of
the eighteen eighties. And he has gained new
laurels on the old well-known field. He has
probably hardly ever painted anything more
delicate than Sjoblom's Scow ; Dagmar has been
imagined mainly as a tone of soft, northern blond-

every line of his brush, in every play of sunlight
and each wrinkle on her face. In Sunday, both
the model and the stamning, or mood, are
different. Here we have a herd-girl, who, alone in
her shealing high up among the fells, has dressed
herself in her whitest shift and the best skirt she

ness, while Startled — a

has at hand, and hears the

picture of this year showing
three young women run-
ning towards the water
—must perhaps be ac-
counted, from an artistic
point of view, the richest
in conception, with its de-
lineation of that typically
Swedish, obliquely trun-
cated shore-motif which
has so often served as the
frame of his paintings of
the nude. What is most
worthy of our admiration
in these things is the
manner in which the
atmosphere melts, as it
were, into human figure
and the landscape, and the
natural, innate freedom of
the movements. Simply
astounding in the last-
named picture is the way
in which the artist has
caught and reproduced in
his canvas the light, un-
constrained movement of
the startled women in their
hurry to seek shelter, and
their careful stepping over
the pine-needles that cover
the slippery rocks. From
a psychological point of
view this rendering of
movement is absolutely
convincing.
That feeling of subtilised
French technique which


“ALMA.” STATUETTE MODELLED IN
RED CLAY BY ANDERS ZORN

clang of the Sunday bells
from far away in the dales,
whither the light, hard eyes
look wistfully away from
the terrifying loneliness of
the forest. In Watering
the Horse, again, the artist
carries us to Gopsmor, the
old-time Dalecarlian farm
to which he every now and
then retires in order to be
able to devote himself to
his art without fear of in-
terruption. There he him-
self goes about, like the
man in the picture, dressed
in sheepskin jacket and
knee-breeches, the ancient
costume of Dalecarlian
men. Last of all we have
Matins on Christmas Day,
a poem full of the light of
Christmas and the dawn
of a new day.
But it is, perhaps, as a
portrait painter that Anders
Zorn has won his proudest
laurels and made his name
most widely known.
Amongst portraits of lesser
interest, the exhibition
offered us one of the state-
liest things he has ever
marked with his name and
his genius. It is “ the
counterfeit presentment ”
of one of Sweden’s most
prominent business men

one sometimes experiences in the presence of these
pictures of the nude, appears to me to be less in
evidence in Zorn’s pictures of peasants in their
dresses, and in his portraits. He seizes his peasant
women (kullor) with a robuster northern hand
when they stand dressed in their many-coloured
bodices and caps. His Skerikulla is simply and
solely a happy, healthy, peasant lass, and the artist
has expressed her joy of life and her health in

and patrons ot art of late years—Mr. C. F.
Liljewalch. It is a robust nature the artist has
caught on his canvas ; one, it is true, that has
already begun to lose its first vigour, but which still
has strength and power of will enough to be able to
gaze into the great shadow with eyes that look out
undauntedly from beneath the gloom of the
eyebrows.
It is of peculiar interest to compare this last

9°