Zorn is the most important Swedish painter of the late nineteenth century. He was the illegitimate son of a Bavarian brewer who had gone to work in Sweden, and a peasant girl from Dalecarlie. In 1875 he began to attend the Art Academy in Stockholm, where he concentrated chiefly on drawing and watercolour painting. In 1881 after going to Paris, he travelled extensively; he went twice to Spain and Portugal, in 1881-1882 and 1884 he went to London (1882- 1885), to Hungary (1885-1886), to Turkey and then Greece with his young wife, then once more to Spain, and finally to Algiers. In 1887 we find him working with the small international colony of artists at St. Ives in Cornwall. He was particularly interested in studying the effects of light on water (Seascape, St. Ives, Cornwall, 1887-1888, watercolour; Seascape, c. 1887, watercolour) . In 1888 his first large painting St. Ives, Cornwall: fishermen, which had been hung in the Paris Salon, was bought by the state for the Luxembourg museum. In 1896 Zorn settled at Mora and founded a museum there to house his own paintings, but continued to travel in Europe and in the United States. A retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1906. He was a versatile artist, executing oil paintings and drawings, lithographs and engravings, but his particular gift was for watercolours. He also painted a number of portraits, that recall the style of Monet and Degas (Portrait of Antonin Proust, 1888). During the last ten years of his life he tended to give up this type of painting, and his pictures became much more like those of Corinth.

Based on Phaidon encyclopedia of Impressionism, Maurice Serullaz, Phaidon, 1978