Anders Zorn
(1860 - 1920) |
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portraits, Genre Scenes Art Work
| Name: |
Anders Zorn |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
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| Nationality: |
Swiss |
| Birth: |
1860 |
| Death: |
1920 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
portraits, Genre Scenes |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
painter
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Biography
A Swedish painter. Anders Leonard Zorn entered the Stockholm Academy at age 15, and moved to Paris in 1881. He achieved international fame with paintings and portraits that first dealt with realistic themes of Scandinavian life and increasing pictures of naked girls and as bathers, landscape and seaside settings. He also used these themes in etchings that made his work known throughout the globe. From 1896 he lived in Mora, Sweden, where he started a museum that is now named after him. His work is mostly seen there and in Stockholm, Nationalmuseum.
Anders Zorn - along with Carl Larsson painter and sculptor Carl Milles form a troika representing Sweden's best known and respected artists. Books on Zorn are very difficult to obtain and he has never been promoted by his mother country. He is one of the great artists that have faded in the horizon in the last 100 years. His skills were wide and deep. A skilled wood carver as youth, he became a Master etcher, watercolorist, oil painter and sculptor. A painter of royalty, and three US President his love was to depict scenes from his native Mora.
In 1885, the curator of the National Museum in Stockholm contacted Zorn and asked him to finish a painting with a patriotic theme behind it, intended from the outset to be a museum piece. Zorn replied:
"I will paint what I know best, and what I love the most: the fields and the ditches of Mora where I played as a youngster while harvesting was in progress. Grandmother would be the main feature of the painting, boiling the potatoes, packing up her sack of supplies for the workers."
The painting was born and christened "Our daily bread", a watercolor on paper, 25" x 41" and today held as one of the museum's more important and valuable works. To see this painting in real life is amazing experience. You are pulled into the painting with the ditch and grandma, the fragrance of grass drifting on a zephyr breeze running through your hair. Even when standing just a few inches away, it is hard to conceive that this was painted in watercolors; there is amazing tonal control, which would later be employed to near perfection in his oil paintings. Much of his work was done out of doors with an emphasis on nude models. |
Samples of Work
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