“Edo” is the name of the Swedish island where Zorn etched
this beautiful plate
Size of the original etching, 7 × 4⅝ inches
An ardent sensuousness marks all these things, but it is sane and wholesome, with no trace of doubtful submeaning. That is strikingly exemplified in My Model and my Boat, in which the exuberant, re-creating force of life is presented in all its tantalizing seductiveness of ample, quivering curves. The beauty of vigorous symmetry, of inherent strength, overcome the somewhat obvious coarseness of the type of woman depicted here, and one can have nothing but admiration for the underlying sincerity as well as the consummate mastery revealed in every stroke of these plates. But the purely physical allure of his nudes is by no means always as insistent as in the foregoing. The elusive and half-reticent feminine charm has not escaped him, and there are some nudes out of doors, in the lambent light of dawn and twilight, more delicate, more subtly suggestive, than anything hitherto accomplished in etching.
The nudes of Rembrandt would look singularly coarse and heavy by comparison with these silvery, exquisitely modeled Brunhildas of Zorn, who disport themselves on the sunlit beach or emerge from the enveloping shadow of some protruding cliff with a childlike unconsciousness and a pagan naïveté that disarms prudish prejudices. In its supple grace and vibrant vitality the delicately modulated back of the bending figure of The Bather—Evening is a pantheistic hymn to the eternal efflorescence of life. She pauses in the silvery twilight, before breaking the surface of the mirror-like lake into a thousand jewels of refracted light, and she is as much a part of the enshrouding stillness as the aged rocks on which she stands. Whistler never did anything more evanescent than the landscape of this plate, which is printed in a key as light and airy as the magically executed lines, that give the softness of the figure’s contours as well as the hardness of the rocks and the veiled serenity of distant lake and woodland. It is a splendid affirmation of the extremely delicate sensibilities possessed by this most vigorous and brilliant of contemporary etchers, whose art is one of the most powerful and significant manifestations of the re-awakened æsthetic impulse of the twentieth century.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Larger images of most plates can be obtained by clicking on them.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.