Zorn. Sunday Morning in Dalecarlia
Size of the original etching, 10¾ × 7¾ inches
While Zorn to-day occupies a position of unchallenged supremacy in the difficult and exacting field of portraiture—his portrait etchings would alone make a notable Pantheon of contemporary worthies—it is in his frank, unabashed nudes and in his delineations of Swedish peasant types that we find the most personal expression of his peculiar genius. Nowhere has his faculty of instantaneous perception, his ability to grasp at a glance and in its entirety either an isolated individual or a group of figures, been employed to greater advantage than in these brilliant, dazzling nudes and in these veracious records of his beloved Dalecarlian peasants. With a few swift, sure strokes he gives us the soft contour, the undulating curves of the fresh, firm flesh, of these strong-limbed Junos, as well as the wrinkled, time-worn visages of the aged tillers of the soil.
His interest in this type is not episodic, it is persistent. They were his first subjects as well as his first patrons, and throughout his career it is to them that he has turned for rest and refreshment from the social banalities of the mundane life in the great capitals of the world where he is in constant demand as a painter of exclusive society. At heart he remains a peasant, retaining a strong love for the scenes of his boyhood with all their simple associations. Here he is at home, and here he has given untrammeled expression to that paganism which is the dominant trait of his character. He delights in portraying these sturdy, flaxen-haired peasants in all the unconscious abandon of their naïve natures, and the series of plates celebrating the intimate life of these people are the most authentic expressions of his art because the most closely related to the mainsprings of his personality.
His love of the unstudied, unposed naturalness of life has found its culminating expression in these nudes of women and children as seen in the open air in the free solitude of the shores of Dalecarlia. Zorn regards nature with the eagerness of the primitive, and these ruddy women are virile protests against the anemic, hyperæsthetic refinements of the school-room conventions. Stripped of all regard for the accepted ideals of feminine beauty these women of Zorn repel or appeal by the unfeigned candor of every look and gesture. These big, blonde women, whose naked bodies move with unrestrained freedom through the tonic, balsam air are imbued with a superb, healthy animalism such as has never been depicted in the whole history of art. They spring from a strong artistic impulse that has its roots in the subsoil of nature. To see these frankly realistic versions of unsophisticated, throbbing femininity is to feel that the nude has never before been adequately portrayed—all other nudes seem mere means toward some elaborately preconceived end while those of Zorn are gloriously self-sufficing, an end in themselves.
Zorn. The Bather, Seated
Size of the original etching, 6¼ × 4¾ inches
Zorn. Edo