Studio: international art (13.1898)

Anders Zorn

single focus, but that is dazzling with life. He
paints with few colours, but to those colours he
gives an extraordinary strength.

Ten years ago Zorn painted his pictures of
fishermen and Dalecarlian girls with a minute
accuracy, and the portrait of his mother—Mono,
—-is one of the most attractive of all his paint-
ings. The problem of painting water has long
occupied Zorn, and during the summers he has
spent in the Stockholm archipelago he has had a
good opportunity of studying the many tinges and
reflections of the water.

In Stockholm itself and in its surroundings the
water plays a prominent part. The houses of this
city, which is partly built on islands, are reflected
in the water, and both large and small steamers
land in the middle of the town. In the summer
the inhabitants make their homes on the shores of
some of the innumerable bays and sounds which,
about twenty or thirty miles from the capital, widen
into the Baltic, and go to and fro on some of the

" MY GRANDMO'J HER "

PROM A BUS1 IN WOOD BY ANDERS ZORN

168

elegant steamers plying between Stockholm and
the summer resorts in the island belt. The white
steamers glide along the shores where ice-ground
granite rocks alternate with pine and birch woods,
and where villa after villa, and, nearer the open
sea, red-painted peasant and fisher huts, en-
liven the landscape. The boat touches at in
numerable wooden landings, where the light
summer dresses of the ladies flutter in the breeze,
and the young people lead a merry life, boating
and fishing all the day long. From this milieu,
which is to be found nearly all over Sweden, Zorn
has taken the subjects for some of his best
pictures, among others, his Vagskvalp ("The
Lapping of the Waves"), with a motive from
Dalaro, near Stockholm. The picture has some-
thing of an artistic snap-shot in it. A servant maid
is drawing up a pail of water out of the sea, and on
the steamboat-landing sits a flirting couple. The
point of view is somewhat Japanese, which is fre-
quently the case with Zorn's pictures. One of his
first oil-paintings, Ute ("In the Open Air")
(painted in 1888), represents some nude young
girls sunning themselves before bathing. The in-
viting water laps the shore in smooth wavelets, and
the grey granite rock sets off the soft shapes of the
young figures.

As a woman-painter Zorn fills a place of his
own. His nude female figures have nothing of the
studio about them. His types are, as a rule,
genuinely Swedish, with slightly protruding cheek-
bones, a dazzling complexion, flaxen hair, and
plump forms. He loves to give them something
of an animal, yet unconscious sensualism. It is
not of much use trying to describe such pictures as
these. Before them one experiences both surprise
and gratitude. They represent a passionate wor-
ship of nature, without any attempt to symbolise it
in a more or less affected manner.

The idea of the supremacy given by the Latin
race to the ideal of beauty has taken such deep
root in the minds of the public at large that Rem-
brandt's or Diirer's picturesque types of beauty
forcibly strike the Swedish, and I daresay the
Anglo-Saxon, public as being almost ridiculous
and repellent, and without doubt it is frequently
only a respect for the great name which curbs
openly expressed displeasure. At the Exhibition
in Stockholm, 1897, one of Zorn's very best pic-
tures—a nude red-haired woman, painted with a
special maestria, glowing with life, and reminding
one of Rembrandt's Bathing Woman (1654) in the
National Gallery in London—awoke many mixed
feelings, even among critics. Zorn has, however.