Anders Zorn - Zorn’s old flame

Anders Zorn (1860–1920) Sweden

Zorns flamma ( Zorn’s old flame), Madrid, 1884

signed af Zorn and dated Madrid 1884 lower margin
watercolour and pencil on paper laid on cardboard panel
image 21 × 13 cm (8.3 × 5.1 in)
sheet 22 × 15 cm (8.7 × 5.9 in)
framed 33 × 25.5 cm (13 × 10 in)
handmade oak frame with 92% UV protective glass

Provenance:
An important private collection, Sweden

Condition report:
The work is presented under 92% UV protective glass in a handmade oak frame. The sheet is laid on a board. The paper displays age related toning and minor irregularities consistent with its age and technique. The watercolour and pencil remain clearly legible and the principal passages of colour retain good definition. For a more detailed condition report, please contact the gallery.

Essay:
Executed in Madrid in 1884, Zorns flamma belongs to one of the most formative and adventurous periods in the early career of Anders Zorn. At only twenty four years of age, Zorn was already developing the extraordinary facility in watercolour that would establish his international reputation. Travel had become essential to his artistic education. Rather than remaining within the academic environment of Stockholm, he sought subjects, patrons and artistic experience abroad, moving through European cultural centres and absorbing impressions with remarkable speed.

Spain held particular importance for the young artist. Zorn travelled extensively during these years, and Madrid placed him in direct contact with a visual culture profoundly different from that of Sweden. The Spanish capital also offered access to the great masters of the Prado, while contemporary Spanish society provided him with new models and potential patrons. His surviving Spanish watercolours demonstrate his fascination with character, costume, brilliant light and the immediacy of observed life. A substantial Portrait of Cristina Morphy, also dated 1884 and now in the Museo del Prado, bears witness to the level of ambition Zorn had already achieved in watercolour portraiture during his Madrid period.

Zorns flamma, however, presents an altogether different aspect of his art.

Nothing here resembles the polished elegance expected of a commissioned society portrait. The woman emerges from the paper through an extraordinarily economical combination of pencil and transparent washes of brown, ochre and blue grey. Large areas remain scarcely worked. Zorn concentrates his attention almost obsessively upon the head, allowing the body to dissolve into abbreviated strokes and unfinished contours.

It is the face that makes the image so difficult to forget.

The cheeks are hollow, the neck attenuated and the eyes deeply set. The mouth opens slightly to reveal what appears to be a single prominent tooth. Her skin seems stretched tightly across the structure of the skull. At the same time, the elaborate arrangement of her hair or headwear rises dramatically above the face. The contrast is striking: something almost theatrical crowns a physiognomy rendered with uncompromising severity.

The result borders on the grotesque. Yet it would be misleading to treat the image simply as a caricature. Zorn's pencil searches the face repeatedly. Lines overlap around the eyes, forehead and mouth, while translucent colour reinforces rather than conceals the underlying drawing. The method gives the impression of an artist examining a human presence with unusual freedom, liberated from the conventions of formal portraiture.

The traditional title Zorns flamma, literally “Zorn’s old flame”, adds another layer of fascination. If understood in its colloquial Swedish sense, flamma can refer to a sweetheart or romantic attachment. The title has consequently encouraged an interpretation of the sitter as a woman with whom Zorn had a personal relationship. At present, however, this identification should be treated with caution. The available research does not establish securely that the woman represented here was a former lover, nor has her identity been confirmed. 

This distinction is particularly important in 1884. Zorn had met Emma Lamm in 1881 and their relationship belongs to the central biography of these years. The Madrid inscription therefore anchors the drawing in a very specific moment of his personal as well as artistic development, but the precise circumstances in which this remarkable sheet was created remain tantalisingly unresolved.

The work also reveals how radically different Zorn's private or informal studies could be from the virtuoso image of the artist familiar from his later international portraits. There is little concern here with beauty in a conventional sense. Instead, physiognomy itself becomes the subject. Age, exhaustion, eccentricity and bodily imperfection are allowed to dominate the image.

Seen retrospectively, the almost skeletal reduction of the woman's features can bring to mind the late self portraits of Helene Schjerfbeck. The comparison must remain purely visual. Schjerfbeck's most radical self portraits were produced many decades later and there is no suggestion of a direct connection between the works. Yet both artists could reduce a face until the boundary between portrait and memento mori becomes disturbingly narrow. In Zorns flamma, this effect is especially remarkable because it appears so early, in 1884, in the work of an artist subsequently celebrated for sensuality, physical vitality and dazzling technical assurance.

There is also an intriguing contradiction between the apparent frailty of the sitter and the energy of Zorn's execution. The woman's body seems almost to disappear, yet the drawing itself is intensely alive. Pencil loops above the head, washes are placed rapidly across the clothing, and individual strokes remain visible as evidence of the artist's hand. What appears at first to be an image of physical exhaustion is therefore simultaneously a demonstration of youthful artistic confidence.

Sources

Zornmuseet, Mora, biographical and collection material concerning Anders Zorn and his European travels.

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, collection material relating to Anders Zorn and Portrait of Cristina Morphy, 1884.

Anders Zorn, autobiographical writings and published biographical material concerning his travels during the 1880s.

Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, biographical material concerning Anders Zorn.

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, collection and biographical material concerning Anders Zorn.

Comparative literature and museum material concerning Helene Schjerfbeck's late self portraits.