For my last blog featuring Alois Priechenfried I struggled for biographical information. In the next few blogs I am looking at the life and work of the well-known Swedish painter Anders Zorn and I am pleased to say that there has been much written about this talented nineteenth-century artist.
Anders Leonard Zorn was born Anders Leonardsson in the central Swedish town of Mora in Dalarna County on February 18th, 1860. The town of Mora is situated on the isthmus between the lakes Siljan and Orsan. Anders’ mother was Grudd Anna Andersdotter, but to her children, she was simply known as Mona, which meant mother in the Mora dialect. Grudd’s family were farmers and Anders was raised on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Yvraden, a hamlet near the village of Utmeland in the parish of Mora. Anders’ mother subsidised the family’s income by working in Von Düben’s brewery in Uppsala and it was here that she met the German brewer Leonhard Zorn, who became Ander’s father. Although she gave birth to Leonard’s son they never married and sadly, Anders Zorn never met his father who died in Helsinki on Boxing Day, 1872. However, Anders was recognised as Leonhard’s son and was allowed to carry his father’s name.
With the absence of a father in his life Anders Zorn was brought up by his grandparents who had a farm in Yvraden, a parish of Mora. He went to the local primary school in Morastrand and when he was twelve-years-old he was sent to the secondary grammar school in Enköping where he studied Swedish, German, history and geography. Although he was just an average student, he began to show an extraordinary artistic talent, especially when it came to depicting people and horses and he displayed an aptitude for being able to carve figures in wood.
On January 3rd 1874, Ander’s mother, Grudd, just a year after the death of Leonhard Zorn, married Skeri Anders Andersson and the couple lived in Lisselby, a small town thirty kilometres south-east of Mora. They had their first child, a daughter, Karin in the November. Later, three more daughters would enhance Grudd and Anders family. In the July of that year Anders Zorn received a bequest of 3000 SEK from the personal estate of brewer Leonardsson and this was allocated for Anders’s upbringing. The money was given to Anders parental guardian, a farmer in Mora, Bälter Sven Ersson, who set it aside for Anders and his education. The inheritance was well managed and lasted for four years.
In 1875, aged fifteen years of age, Anders Zorn went to study in Stockholm. He firstly went to the school for Handicraft and in that September was enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Art’s preparatory school, which was the de facto Principle School for the Academy. There, he studied, the techniques required for painting, drawing and sculpturing. In August 1878 Anders graduates from the Royal Academy of Fine Art’s preparatory school and enters the main Academy.
The financial support of his inheritance came to an end in 1878, but his late father’s German friends had a collection and the money was given to Anders to carry on with his education at the Academy. In 1879 he completed his studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Art and received his diploma on the June 28th.
In the Autumn of 1880, Anders Zorn moved to a studio at Hamngatsbacken, a street in central Stockholm. At that year’s Academy Students Exhibition Zorn exhibited a watercolour entitled In Mourning. This beautifully crafted and sensitive work, which depicted the sorrowful face of a young girl in mourning, was greatly admired by the public and critics alike. In the Official Swedish Government Gazette of May 22nd the Zorn’s painting was praised by Carl Rupert Nyholm a leading Swedish critic and Zorn was rewarded with 200 SEK for his work of art.
Following on from this, Zorn received a number of portraiture commissions. The most popular of which were from wealthy individuals and society parents who wanted portraits of their children. One example of this is Zorn’s 1880 watercolour portrait of the banker, Ludvig Arosenius.
In the Spring of 1881, Anders Zorn met Emma Amalia Lamm. Emily, who was the same age of Anders Zorn, but came from a completely different background than that of Anders. She and her family, who lived in Stockholm, were Jewish and her ancestors had settled in Sweden in the 1770’s. They were a wealthy middle-class family who had a love for art and culture and led an intense social life. Her father, Martin Oscar Lamm, who was a wholesale textile merchant, and was part of the S.L. Lamm & Son Textile Company, and her mother, Henriette Lamm (née Meyerson) had three children, Herman, Anna and Emma.
The meeting between Zorn and Emma came about as he had been commissioned to paint a portrait of Emma’s nephew, Nils, the three-year-old son of her sister, Anna and it coincided with Emma who was acting as a babysitter for the young boy. For Anders and Emma, it was a case of “love at first sight” and they became secretly engaged on June 2nd which was just a few months after they had first met. Emma’s family were charmed by her young man but the secret nature of the engagement was probably due to Emma’s parents realising that Anders’ early career as an artist would not be sufficiently lucrative for him to support their daughter.
In August 1881, Zorn went abroad to study and to try to earn enough money to support a family. He left Sweden and travelled to Spain via Paris with his friend Ernest Josephson. The pair visited Madrid, Toledo and Seville and by the end of the year were lodged in Cadiz. It was in Cadiz that Zorn exhibited some of his work and they received great acclaim from the local art critics. He continued his travels in the early part of 1882 passing through Nice and Genoa before arriving in the Italian capital. Eventually he returned to Paris where he met up with Emma and her mother.
For the next four years Anders spent time in England and Spain, returning to his home in Mora during the summers and in the town of Dalarö which lay on the East coast, south west of Stockholm, where the Lamm family rented a summerhouse. He liked to depict people in their traditional costumes. One example of this is his painting entitled A Swedish Girl in Mora Folk Dress. The woman in the present painting is wearing the traditional folk dress of the small parish of Mora, in Dalarna Sweden, where Anders Zorn was born and raised. Even today Dalarna is regarded as the most typical and traditional of Swedish landscapes, and the folk dress plays a large part in the area’s culture. Zorn maintained a home in Mora and contributed greatly to the preservation of the area’s folk customs and dress, as well their local dialect.
During these periods spent on the coast Anders developed a technique of painting water illustrating the fluctuating and reflective surface. An example of this type of work can be seen in his 1887 painting, Rocks at Dalarö II.
Anders and Emma did not get officially engaged until the July 2nd 1885 by which time Anders was financially sound thanks to the many commissions he was completing. Shortly after the engagement Emma and her mother travelled to Mora to meet Anders’ mother and other members of the family. The couple married in a civil ceremony on October 18th 1885. The newly married couple spent the next eleven years travelling, including a honeymoon in Constantinople, where Anders became seriously ill with typhoid fever. Despite their travels in Europe, the couple always returned to Sweden in the summer. In 1886, Zorn had acquired a vacant lot near the church in Mora church and designed and had built a house for his family. Additions were constantly made to the house, and by 1910 it was finished. The house, now known as Zorn House, is surrounded by a garden with berry bushes and fruit trees and adorned with a fountain sculpture in bronze made by Zorn himself. In the garden is the artist’s studio. The Zorngården, as it is called, is one of the most well-known artist homes in Sweden. It remains today almost untouched since their time and is now a museum dedicated to the life of Anders and Emma Zorn.
Emma and Anders Zorn spent the winter of 1887-88 in St Ives in Cornwall. This was an artistic turning point for Zorn. He began to paint in oils and one of earliest oil paintings, A Fisherman in St Ives, was an acclaimed success. It was accepted by the Paris Salon jurists for the 1888 exhibition and received a First Class Medal. By the end of the show it had been acquired by the French state.
Following that achievement, Zorn was awarded a Gold Medal there for his 1888 work, Fish Market in St Ives. This painting is looked upon as one of his most outstanding watercolours.
By 1889 Anders and Emma had finally settled down in their first home in Paris and the French capital was to be their base for the next eight years. It was a challenging time for Emma as having come from a privileged household she had never learnt to cook. However, on the plus-side she had an amazing organisational talent and soon she began to manage her husband’s affairs, arranging contacts with galleries and museums and ensuring his work was well publicised. Art historians now look upon this period, from Anders’ arrival in Paris and the following five years, as his finest artistic years and ones that raised his profile as one of the leaders of the Parisian art scene. In 1889, when he was 29, he was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur at the Exposition Universelle, the Paris World Fair.
Galleria degli Uffizi
Anders Zorn was asked to paint his self-portrait for the Vasari Corridor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The Vasari Corridor is a long, raised passageway that connects Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria to Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river Arno. The passageway was designed and built in 1564 by Giorgio Vasari in just 6 months to allow Cosimo de’ Medici and other Florentine elite to walk safely through the city, from the seat of power in Palazzo Vecchio to their private residence, Palazzo Pitti.
The passageway contains over 1000 paintings, dating from the 17th and 18th centuries, including the largest and very important collection of self-portraits by some of the most famous masters of painting from the 16th to the 20th century. The collection now has over 400 portraits on view. They are hung along the corridor facing each other in chronological order. The self-portraits at the beginning of the collection are also hung according to the artist’s origin, Italians on the right and everywhere else on the left.
……………..….to be continued
my daily art display 