In 1896 the Zorns returned to Sweden and went to live at their home, Zorngården, in Mora. Anders’ wife, Emma, immersed herself in the life of the small town and became involved in many different local activities including setting up a small local library and a small society where people could meet and practice their handicraft skills. She also founded the Zorn Children’s Home and the local community was indebted to her for the setting up of a public school for adults in Mora which came into being as a result of the active participation and financial support from her and her husband. Anders and Emma’s relationship is believed to have changed somewhat during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It appears they grew apart, found it difficult to agree on many things, and their marriage changed from one based on deep mutual love, as it was at the beginning, to one of friendly companionship.
Above all else, it was Anders’ skill as a portrait artist that gained him international acclamation. He had the innate capacity to depict his sitters’ individual character and this can be seen in his 1888 portrait of the French journalist and politician, Antonin Proust.
Another fine portrait by Zorn was his 1889 one featuring Ernest Alexandre Honoré Coquelin a French actor who was better known as Coquelin Cadet, to distinguish him from his brother. Zorn believed that a portrait should be painted in an environment that was natural for the model. An artificial studio environment was not to his taste.
At around about the time Anders and Emma settled in Paris and he started to complete paintings which depict not only water, one of his favourite motifs, but nudes either in the water or on the banks of rivers. One such work was his 1888 work entitled Outdoors, which is currently housed in the Gothenburg Art Museum.
Another painting by Zorn depicting nudes and water is his poignant work featuring a mother and her young child whom she is trying to instill in him/her a love of water. This 1888 painting is entitled The First Time and is housed at the Ateneum, the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki.
Zorn completed a number of genre paintings, which focused on the depiction of light and shadow and if you are in North Carolina, near the town of Asheville, then you should make your way to the Biltmore Estate and see one such painting by him. The main residence of the estate is a Châteauesque-style mansion built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895 and is the largest privately-owned house in the United States and there, on the second-floor living area, you will find a beautiful genre painting by Anders Zorn, entitled The Waltz.
It is a genre painting in as much it captures life at a ball. Zorn completed it in 1891. It is a romantic depiction in which we see dance partners gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes but it is all about the artist’s clever use of light and shadow in his portrayal of differing light conditions. The background is bathed in bright light and the ladies’ white dresses glow beautifully. This is in stark contrast to the light conditions in the right middle ground. It is darker in this area of the ballroom, with a dark curtain as a background, which further cuts off the bright-light gaiety of the main dance floor. With the darkness comes intimacy and this sense can be seen in the eyes of the male dancer in the foreground as he peers longingly into the eyes of his partner. Behind them, a man sits alone at a table and watches the dancers. Is he truly alone? Does he wish he was on the dance floor with a beloved partner? The third section of differing light is from the lamp on the table close to the lone man. From its glow, which is reflected on the floor, we can see another couple dancing and catch a faint glimpse of tables in the background. Zorn completed the painting in 1893 and on show at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago that year where it was purchased by George Vanderbilt.
Another of Zorn’s paintings around this time, which focused on the depiction of light and shadows, is one that is held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway–Kenmore neighbourhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is entitled The Omnibus and Zorn completed it in 1892. We see five people seated on the bus with their backs to the windows. Look how he has portrayed the light from outside streaming through the windows. It is reflected on the neck of the girl in the foreground and the parcel she holds on her knee. The clothes of the travellers are dark and contrast with the splashes of light in the windows.
During the summers, Zorn spent most of the time at home in Mora and he painted prolifically. One painting of this era which I particularly like is his Realist painting entitled Our Daily Bread, which he completed around 1886 and is now housed at the National Museum in Stockholm. In the painting we see an elderly peasant sitting on a dried-up riverbank gazing forlornly at the ground. Besides her, there is a loaf of bread and a boiling cauldron is hung precariously on a wooden pole, which is resting on the steep banks of the stream. A young child approaches carrying kindling, which will be added to the fire under the boiling cauldron.
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, often called the Chicago World’s Fair was a world’s fair, which was held in Chicago to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the New World in 1492. Anders Zorn, whose status as a leading Swedish artist, was selected by the Swedish government to act as the superintendent of the Swedish art exhibition at the Fair. Zorn travelled to the United States that year and remained in the country for twelve months. During the next fifteen years, he would revisit America six more times, usually between autumn and spring allowing him time to return to his beloved Sweden in the summer. Zorn loved America and the lifestyle it offered him during his frequent trips to the country but more importantly, it presented him with many portrait commissions, including numerous statesmen and society figures and those of three US presidents, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt.
One such portrait was his 1899 portrait of Stephen Grover Cleveland, the American Democratic politician, and lawyer who became the twenty-second president of the United States in 1885, held office for four years before being defeated by the Republican candidate, Benjamin Harrison, but then in 1892 he again won the race to the White House to become the twenty-fourth US President. Zorn painted this portrait two years after Cleveland had completed his second term. The sittings for the portrait, which lasted for several days, took place at the former president’s estate in Princeton, New Jersey. Zorn and Cleveland got on well during the sittings and the ex-President was well satisfied with the portrait, joking to a friend:
“… As for my ugly mug, I think the artist has ‘struck it off’ in great shape…”
Frances Folsom Cleveland by Anders Zorn (1899)That same year, 1899, Zorn completed a portrait of Grover Cleveland’s wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland. Francis Folsom was the daughter of Oscar Folsom, a lawyer and long-time close friend of Grover Cleveland. Cleveland first met Frances Folsom shortly after she was born in 1864 and, when her father was killed in a carriage accident in 1875, the court appointed Cleveland administrator of the estate and he oversaw her upbringing after her father’s death. After High School, Frances attended Wells College in Aurora, New York, and it was around this time when Frances was twenty-one that the relationship between Grover Cleveland and Frances developed romantically. The couple married at the White House on June 2nd, 1886. Frances was twenty-one years old and her husband was forty-nine.
Another American President to feature in one of Zorn’s paintings was Republican, William Howard Taft who became the twenty-seventh US President in 1909. The portrait of Taft, which is housed at the White House, was painted by Zorn during his last visit to America in 1911.
Isabella Stewart Gardner was a leading American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. She was the daughter of wealthy linen-merchant David Stewart and Adelia Smith Stewart. On the death of her father, she inherited $1.75 million and around this time she started to buy European fine art. In 1903 her own museum in Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which she had built to house her extensive art collection, was opened to the public. She was friends with many artists, such as James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent and during Anders Zorn’s first visit to America, he travelled to Boston where he met Gardner. Through this meeting developed a friendship and soon Zorn became popular with Boston’s wealthy artistic society. In 1894 Zorn painted a portrait of Isabella Gardner at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, one of her favourite haunts, which had become a meeting place for a circle of American and English expatriates in Venice.
Zorn’s depiction of Isabella is a joy to behold. Look how he has managed to depict her vivacity and total joie de vivre as she moves into the dining room from the balcony, which overlooks the Grand Canal, imploring her dinner guests to come on to the terrace and witness the beauty of the late evening and the excitement of the ensuing firework display. Her arms are outstretched. She is beside herself with the joy of the moment. Anne O’Hagan Shinn, a well-known American feminist, suffragist, journalist, and writer of short stories, on seeing the painting described it as:
“…a flamelike incarnation of vigour and life – impression helped, doubtless, by the wonderful yellow gown which swathes the strong and supple figure that seem to leap from the canvas…”
………………to be continued
my daily art display 
Wondering what I should think of an eBay purchase that is an older oil that looks like a copy of, (with less detail and finish and more limited color palette) almost like it was done quickly, the Isack Van Ostade you once posted. Hope it wasn’t a study by Ostade because as an amateur painter I touched up the garish looking faces, they’d looked like they’d been sketched in with white and black paint and yet other aspects of the painting looked like someone painted it with some skill but maybe in a hurry. I thought it might have been a study but not by anyone famous, then I saw your post. Even the canvas stretcher seems inexpensive like student quality. Maybe its just an old art school exercise by a random student.