Anders Zorn

Anonymous sale ('Property of a European Private Collector'), London, Sotheby's, 14 June 2005, lot 173;

Where acquired by the father of the present owner.

E. Kinander (ed.), Invigningsutställning. Larsson-Liljefors-Zorn, exh. cat., Stockholm 1916, p. 43, no. 117.

Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Invigningsutställning. Larsson-Liljefors-Zorn, March – April 1916, no. 117.

Work was Zorn's best retreat during the years following the outbreak of the First World War. With the possibility of international exchange with artists and patrons increasingly difficult, he isolated himself for weeks at a stretch, either in the wild country of Gopsmor outside Mora, or other remote regions of Sweden.

Longing for his boat and the sea, every year he would spend time in his treasured Stockholm archipelago. The present work, which he titled Småländska, may have been painted there, using a model from Småland in South Sweden, or else in the lakelands of Småland itself.

Småländska epitomises the gusto and vitalism with which Zorn depicted the nude en plein air. His strong feeling for the solidity of forms, enhanced by his work as a sculptor, gradually led to an evolution towards an increasingly sculptural conception of the human body in his paintings.