Anders Leonard Zorn (18 February 1860 – 22 August 1920) was a Swedish artist sometimes associated with the Impressionist movement.
Zorn’s father was a Bavarian (i.e. Western German) brewer and his mother was a Swedish farmgirl. He was born on his grandparents’ farm and took to art at a young age. He worked initially in watercolor paintings, later expanding to oils, etchings, and sometimes sculpture. His formative influences included the well-traveled Swedish painter Egron Lundgren as well as Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, with some of his mature work emulating American portraitist John Singer Sargent.
In 1885 Zorn married Emma Lamm, a young woman from one of Sweden’s more prominent Jewish families. Emma Zorn would be active in nurturing and promoting her husband’s art career. Along with Stockholm and Anders’s hometown of Mora, the couple spent time living in London, Paris, and the United States. In the last of these Zorn directed the Swedish art exhibition at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and painted portraits of US Presidents Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.
His color palette, named after him, consists of white, yellow ochre, vermilion red, and black; it is said to be an ideal limited palette for portraiture.
Notable works:
- Castles In the Air (1885)
- Lady with fur coat (1887)
- En premiärnote (1888)
- Omnibus (1891 or 1892)
- A Portrait of the Daughters of Ramón Subercaseaux (1892)
- The King of Sweden, Oscar II (1898)
- Portrait of Frances Cleveland (1899)
- Dance in Gopsmore (1906)
- Woman in a Boat (1917)
Tropes associated with Anders Zorn:
- Big Beautiful Woman: The women depicted in his genre scenes and nudes were very often on the fleshy side.
- Dancing Is Serious Business: He repeatedly returned to the subject of crowds of people dancing, which in his rural paintings seems to express the spirit of the people.
- The Dandy: Zorn himself as depicted in some of his self-portraits, and some of his other subjects as well.
- Disappeared Dad: His parents were never married, and in fact Zorn never actually met his father.
- Face Framed in Shadow: Zorn had an eye for the dramatic ways limited light could play on the human face, as shown in the two etchings on this page
. - Real Is Brown: The muted, earthy colors, are a result Zorn's usage of only 4 colors, with the blacks and grays registering as blues. In some paintings, he would have added touches of viridian green and cobalt blue in foliage and skies.
- The Gilded Age: He was in the US painting portraits and other things during this period.
