Anders Zorn (1860-1920)

Anders Zorn (1860–1920) was one of the leading European artists in the period around 1900. He was a contemporary of Edvard Munch and of Max Liebermann, who was a personal friend and the subject of one of his paintings. Zorn’s interest lay above all in creating realistic likenesses in the French tradition, which he executed with his characteristically rapid technique both in his painting and with an etching needle on copper plates. His models were prominent figures of international public life.

Next to Berlin and Dresden, the 50 works by Anders Zorn in the collection of the Hamburg Kunsthalle’s Department of Prints, Drawings and Photography represent the most comprehensive stock of etchings by the Swedish painter and graphic artist in Germany. The majority, namely 42 out of the 50 etchings held in the museum, were acquired during the artist’s lifetime under the directorship of Alfred Lichtwark. As early as 1891, Lichtwark invited Zorn to come to Hamburg to paint a work for the »Galerie Hamburger Bilder«.

Zorn was no artistic innovator in the manner of the profoundly intense Norwegian painter Munch, he was an artist with visible leanings towards Impressionism who was active in the period leading up to Modernism and whose swiftly executed and psychologically perceptive etched portraits still hold an appeal for viewers today. As far as our own city is concerned, it ought not to be forgotten that Hamburg’s Commeter gallery mounted a comprehensive exhibition of 163 etchings by Zorn as early as April 1911, more than half of which were sold on the evening of the opening. Particular highlights among the pieces selected for this exhibition in the Hall of Master Drawings are the Portrait of the artist with his wife (1890), that of the French poet Paul Verlain (1895) and the extremely freely worked likeness of the dancer Rosita Mauri (1889). There is a close link between Zorn’s etching of the opera singer and art collector Jean Baptiste Faure (1891) and the Hamburg Kunsthalle, as a portrait of Faure in one of his stage roles which was painted by Édouard Manet also belongs to our collection, and it is to be assumed that Alfred Lichtwark viewed this etching in the context of Manet’s masterpiece.