Anders Zorn – Sommarnöje (Summer Fun)

Anders Zorn was a Swedish painter born in 1860, so a near contemporary of such artistic luminaries as John Singer Sargent (b. 1856), Georges Seurat (b.1859), and Edvard Munch (b. 1863). Van Gogh (b.1853), perhaps now the most notorious and exalted of all of that generation, was born just a few years before. Zorn was internationally famous in his day and very highly regarded yet his name now doesn’t resonate (except of course in his Scandinavian homeland) in quite the way than does some of that cohort. This may be because art historians do not always look back favourably on painters who appear not to have struggled for acceptance or who became rich through their work, or those who were simply too popular. Anyone appealing to too wide an audience, not challenging enough, insufficiently ‘difficult’ to understand, or not passably recherché or themselves not personally troubled enough often tend to fall from critical favour.

 In Zorn’s case, all this is compounded by the fact that art making seemed too easy for him. He had a natural draughtsman’s gift, an ability to craft a likeness or a landscape very quickly. But in my estimation, this does not disqualify him from acclamation as a true artist – his commercial success does not mean that he lacked an artist’s singular vision nor one’s ability to say something uncommon or poetic about the human condition. Sometimes criticised for ‘emptiness’ - all technique, and no heart - this is a misreading of Zorn’s feeling for cool northern European light and for the undemonstrative and simple folksy charm of Dalecarlian culture that lay in his background. This formed a sensibility in him which he even brought to more cosmopolitan subjects and his portraits of the great and the good as a result of his seemingly endless travels abroad.

The other reason for criticism of him today is his predilection for depicting female nudes and it is true that the number of these and their troublingly voyeuristic ‘male gaze’ does not fit with acceptable contemporary values, but I am going to sidestep that particular issue for now - the subject is more complex than simplistic denunciation would suggest. For now, I want to look at Zorn’s delicacy in his painterly response to the natural world, the tenderness of his manner, his aesthetic consciousness.

Anders Zorn, Sommarnöje (1886), watercolour paint on paper, private collection

There is precious little sign of summer warmth in his watercolour titled Sommarnöje (Summer Fun), a painting made in Dalarö, an archipelago to the south-east of Stockholm. The sky is overcast and its grey light is reflected off the silvery grey wavelets that ripple over the water’s surface. The time of year is only recognisable by the female figure’s white dress and bonnet, albeit that the redness of her ear and cheeks suggests the temperature’s unseasonal chilliness. That figure is Emma, the artist’s wife, while in the rowing boat we see their friend, the local maritime pilot, the man entrusted with guiding vessels (and individual paying customers) through the tricky straits of water between the islands and the Baltic Sea. He has just now shipped one oar, depicted as masterfully foreshortened by the artist, as his vessel nears the jetty-side, while Emma watches from above.

The work is like a little study in class and sex distinction. He wears a battered and torn straw hat, and a light grey foul weather tunic, unbuttoned to reveal coarse black waistcoat and trousers and with leather sea boots. His face is weatherbeaten, his beard straggly and his eyes narrowed to crinkles against the water’s glare. He stands for the authenticity of the mariner’s hard life on the sea, for experience and local wisdom, for manual sculling strength and dexterity. Meanwhile, Emma, the young woman that Zorn had married just the year before, is literally looking down on him. She is dressed in the summer finery of a late century bourgeoise. She has slightly hoisted her skirt coquettishly to reveal a fashionably heeled shoe as she prepares to lower herself onboard. It is not immediately obvious how this will be achieved and so we can imagine an awkward interface about to occur between posh and privileged female and salty Swedish seadog. That red face of hers may be caused as much by embarrassment as the temperature. He is in his element, she out of it although we do know that Emma came from a family local to the region, so her apparent inaptitude to seafaring ways may be feigned for the occasion in the spirit of artistic license.

The painting gives us a sense of the relative safety of the far shoreline and the nearby dock against the precarity of the bobbing vessel and the unforgiving dangers of the distant open sea. Emma’s bonnet is set against the horizon line where almost indistinguishable sea and sky meet to define an infinitude of unfathomability, a bourne from which the traveller’s return is hard to conceive of. That bonnet could hardly be less suitable for any journey towards it. The pilot is like a modern Charon, the ferryman who navigated the waters of the Styx, guiding souls to the underworld. Emma might be a latter-day Eurydice to the artist’s Orpheus. I don’t want to extend beyond stretching point what may be a fanciful comparison on my part except to say that the painting does convey a sense of Emma’s vulnerability, a peril from which Zorn seems anxious to recall her.

But of course, the true mastery in this work lies in the artist’s bravura treatment of the sea, the exceptional quality of light reflectance that conjures both hidden depths and the cruel glacial grip of its far emptiness. In the lower half of the painting in particular, the water seems almost benign. Zorn’s use of fluid cobalt green that coalesces into lapping circles at the lower right perfectly describe the movement of sploshing seawater as it forms random, elliptical, interference pattern shadows beneath the boat and the dock. You can almost hear its gurgles as it sucks at the jetty’s salt-silvered timbers. Observed up close, the watercolour brushstrokes have an entirely appropriate-to-the-atmosphere freedom and spontaneity of application while the contrasting streaks of white serve to energise the surface plane. Those green shadows tell us that the cloud-obscured sun shines from behind the figures. Its rays are diffused through a gauze of overcast glare and the water’s chop reflects them into a limitless number of glints. The more distant body of water dissolves into the lowering mizzle of the sky but nevertheless shimmers in its ever-restless movement. The here-and-now, flesh and blood corporeality of the figures becomes almost photo-realistic against the timeless sweep of the faceless ocean.

And yet the painting does not convey any low spiritedness. Rather, as the title suggests, it is summer fun Nordic-style which is on offer here. What it speaks of is affection for homeland, a unique sense of place and belonging. Although Whistlerian in its ‘arrangement’ of tones and in its aestheticist approach to austere natural beauty, Zorn also captures the affiliation between his figures and their native surroundings. They are temperamentally suited to live here – it is where they fit. The land, the sea and the sky speak their language.

Zorn’s artistic reputation and peer comparison may be circumscribed by art-critical judgements today, but he deserves to be recognised for his sensitivity and the genius loci he conjures.