THE CRITIC AS CRITIC
AUGUST 2013
Review by Joellen Masters
‘Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America,’
Hostetter Gallery, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, February 28 – May
13, 2013.
According to his obituary in the October 16, 1920 American Art News, Anders Zorn
was ‘a cosmopolitan in an age when cosmopolitans are becoming scarce in number
despite the shrinkage of the world and the closer communion of the great nations
of the earth’ (5). Born in 1860, Zorn was raised by his maternal grandparents in
Mora, the small Swedish village which would become the respite in ‘his lifelong
wanderlust’ (Facos 37).1 Zorn’s parents had met in Stockholm where his mother
worked in a brewery; shortly afterward, his father, a prosperous brewery master,
abandoned the young and unmarried woman. In 1875, the precociously talented
Zorn moved to Stockholm and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art until 1881
when, frustrated by the Academy’s conventional methods and rigid views, he
discontinued his studies and moved to London. It was in England that Zorn
learned the art of etching, a genre that saw a rebirth in the nineteenth century.
Zorn became one of the most celebrated artists of this form, and the etching’s
reproducible nature fueled his rapidly developing reputation.2 It was in London,
too, that Zorn began his lucrative career painting portraits, the genre that would
ensure his financial success and repute in the United States.
By the time he first met Isabella Stewart Gardner at the Chicago World’s Fair in
1893, Zorn was a prestigious and highly visible presence in the European art
market and a rival for John Singer Sargent in commissioned portraits. His celebrity
had faded considerably by the Great War, and at his death in August 22, 1920, he
was almost forgotten.3
Today he is regarded as a minor artist, virtually
unrecognized outside of his native country. Anne Hawley, the Gardner Museum’s
director, says this perception occludes the rich variety in Zorn’s output, continuing
to split appreciation between European collectors who knew him for his nudes and
rural genre scenes, and the American clientele Zorn cultivated so assiduously and
who sat for his portraits (Director’s Foreword 7). The recent special exhibition at
the Gardner Museum in Boston, ‘Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces
America,’ set itself the commendable mission to restore the Swedish artist’s
diminished fame.4 This intelligent show was the debut exhibit by Oliver Tostmann,
who joined the Gardner’s curatorial staff in April 2011,5 and the first historic
exhibition in the Museum’s new Renzo Piano-designed wing, the sleek glass and
steel modern addition that opened in January 2012. The show combined Zorn
works from the Gardner’s rich holdings with those on loan, some for the first time,
from institutions such as the Goteborgs Konstmuseum, the Nationalmuseum in
Stockholm, and the Zorn Museum in Mora.
As Tostmann notes, only two
American exhibitions in the last twenty-five years have made the Swedish artist
their focus.6 The Boston show’s restrained presentation took a modest step in
making Anders Zorn better known in the United States.
Tostmann juxtaposed versions of Zorn’s paintings; he set etchings side-by-side
with their larger oil renditions; he combined all to illustrate the wide range in
Zorn’s artistic curiosity, methodical process, and creative output. Rather than
following a presentation scheme that would contain Zorn’s works within a
biographical and linear narrative, Tostmann divided the Hostetter Gallery’s
intimate space into five distinct wall areas, arranging the representative works by
category rather than chronological period. Zorn was a belle époque painter in
demand by the period’s key art collectors, a savvy ‘entrepreneur who was always
looking for new clients’ and ‘a self-made man who figured out early how to operate
in the modern art world,’ skilled at creating works for distinct exhibition and
gallery spaces and in employing styles and content his time viewed as particularly
‘modernist’ (Tostmann 8).7
To that end, the curatorial choice beautifully
showcased Zorn’s efforts with genre and subject throughout his many years of
professional activity.
Tostmann launched us immediately into Zorn’s celebrity and, more importantly,
his great friendship with Isabella Stewart Gardner. ‘Zorn and Gardner,’ the
gallery’s opening room, provided a welcoming space for the viewer. An enormous
reproduction of a 1920 photograph of the sixty-year-old Zorn on the handsome
deep blue wall showed him prosperous and mustachioed, dressed in his artist’s
smock, seated in his Mora studio with his Yorkshire terrier Mouche at his side. He
gazed coolly from under the wall’s stenciled quotation from the New York Journal,
October 10, 1900: ‘Zorn, A Prince of Art, is Again Our Visitor.’8 The quotation set a
nicely self-referential tone and justification for the display, reminding us of the
Museum’s mission with its exhibit, and Gardner’s great affection and professional
promotion for the Swedish painter.9
This anterior gallery space showcased their relationship with examples such as the
lovely 1894 pencil and red chalk on paper study for Gardner’s face, an image no
more than three inches across, but entrancing and sweet. Zorn captures Gardner in
an alert, inquisitive expression; her parted lips and rounded softness in her face
enhance the portrait’s charm. Several etchings here introduced viewers to his
immense ease with the medium. Gardner’s first commission to Zorn had been an
etched portrait in 1894 that, as the descriptive label explained, with its coat-of-arms
decorated drape and Gardner dressed in a fur cape and seated in a neoclassicalstyle chair, depict her as a ‘status-conscious member of the American upper class.’
Reading, another 1894 etching, is an exquisite rendering of matrimonial harmony.
Charles Deening, the wealthy Chicago businessman and Zorn’s best American
patron, highlighted in the background, smokes his pipe, while his wife, Marion, sits
reading to him in a delicately shadowed foreground. An 1890 etching, Zorn and His
Wife, one of several artist ‘portraits’ in the show, further illustrated his astonishing
skill with line.
Zorn and His Wife, 1890 (etching), Zorn, Anders Leonard (1860-1920) / © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
Boston, MA, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library
Posed in the left foreground, with an etching needle in his right hand and a sheaf of
papers in his left and on the table before him, Zorn gazes out and beyond the
viewer. His serious expression is in line with that of his wife, Emma, who stands
self-confidently behind him and before the perpendicular framing lines of an
interior door . . . or, perhaps, a canvas on an easel
Below this grouping, a single glass case displayed various personal objects, such as
the 1894 cartoon drawing Zorn made of Gardner, ‘The Madonna of the Charity,’ a
good-humored commentary on her warm support for musicians, artists, and
writers. Selected photographs showed the Gardners and the Zorns floating in
gondolas during the autumn 1894 visit Anders and his wife Emma made to the
Palazzo Barbaro which the Gardners rented for their many trips to Venice. 10 A few
letters from Zorn to Gardner typified their spirited correspondence with Zorn’s
often embellished with his lively illustrations.11 In a 1904 note, for instance, written
when he returned to Europe after his fifth American visit, Zorn sketched himself in
the foreground, weeping and weighted down with luggage, while a stick-figure of
Gardner in the background waves farewell from her Greenhill country home in
Brookline. The case included Christian Eriksson’s silver soap box, a commission
arranged by Zorn for Gardner in 1895. Art Nouveau in style, the handle for the
soap box’s lid is fashioned like a young girl who bathes in the rippling silver
watery surface that seems to spill down the square sides.12 Included, too, was the
cablegram Gardner received in late August 1920 from their mutual friend, Hjalmar
Lundbohm, notifying her that Zorn had died.
Unfortunately, in comparison to the lavish vitrines and cabinets in Fenway Court’s
older and original spaces, cloaked in velvet covers that tempt the viewer with the
promise of hidden delights, this single case made a pallid imitation of those
Gardner herself had put together. Nonetheless the display case’s prudent selection
gave a glimpse into the special camaraderie between two figures whose ‘origins
could hardly have been more different, he the illegitimate son of a Swedish peasant
and Isabella Stewart Gardner, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist’ (Facos 36), a
closeness further demonstrated with the several portraits in this room. In December
1898, Zorn made his third trip to America. When he learned that Jack Gardner had
died early in that month, Zorn moved in with the grieving Isabella and set up his
studio in her Back Bay home. The six portraits of Gardner relatives and friends he
painted during this sojourn suggest Zorn’s sensitive understanding of the powerful
curative effect his work could bring to the recently widowed Gardner who was
grateful for the companionship of her ‘very dear and delightful’ Swedish friend.
The exhibit displayed four of these, ‘each,’ as Gardner explained in a letter to a
friend, ‘perfect in its way’ (qtd. in European Artist 153). All reflect the leisurely
upper-class Boston life but in deceptively simple compositions. Martha Dana, later
Mrs. William R. Mercer (1899), a protégée of Gardner’s, sets the beautiful young
woman against a bare background that highlights the tailored femininity in her
high-collared shirtwaist blouse, close-fitting black jacket, and small hat with its red
flower that compliments rather than hides the delicate contours in her face. In
Joseph Randolph Coolidge (1899), the male subject – Jack Gardner’s brother-in-law –
commands the portrait’s three-quarter space. What Tostmann defines as Zorn’s
‘deliberately limited palette (consisting of [his] signature colors of ochre, white,
black, and red)’ (‘International Success’ 21) augments the restrained richness in
Coolidge’s dark suit and his deep blue bow-tie. He holds in his right hand a red
piece from Halma, the board game that this prominent Boston figure had invented.
Most striking, perhaps, is George Peabody Gardner (1899), a handsome full-length
image of Jack Gardner’s nephew set opposite Zorn’s photograph. Gardner stands
and leans, like the cue stick to his right, against a green felt-covered billiard table.
The male figure’s strong vertical presence in the canvas’s center splits the
composition. As with the other portraits, Zorn limits the background’s detail. Flat
swaths of brown and deep cream throw into greater prominence Gardner’s
masculine self-assurance. The sophisticated grey shades in his suit with its long
frock coat, the deep navy cravat, the casual drape in his gold watch chain all
contribute to the image’s understated force. Together, the portraits signified that in
1898 and 1899 Zorn was indeed, again, ‘our visitor’; they iterated Zorn’s centrality
in the familial context of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Boston world and displayed his
great talents with portraiture.
Viewers could enter the Hostetter Gallery’s larger section from the right or the left.
Either way we were greeted by the portrait, Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice (1894)
which hung on its own small wall in the room’s middle. This masterful design
decision contributed a delightful effect in its continued emphasis of Zorn’s
relationship with Gardner and its reminder that the luxurious installations in
Gardner’s Fenway rooms and residence lie adjacent to the impersonal modernity of
the Museum’s new wing. Zorn painted this lyrical portrait during the visit he and
his wife made to the Palazzo Barbaro in 1894.13 In it, Gardner has turned away
from watching the fireworks over the Grand Canal outside her window and steps
back into the salon.
Mrs Gardner (1860-1920) in Venice, 1894 (oil on canvas),
Zorn, Anders Leonard (1860-1920) / © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA / The Bridgeman
Art Library
Zorn portrays the middle-aged Gardner in a joyful moment – the strong contrasts
between her shimmering white evening dress and pearl necklace and the deep dark
space behind and around the figure emphasize his hostess’s radiant personality.
His great skill with light effects shows in how he renders Gardner’s hands whose
palms and outstretched fingers reflect in the glass panes they touch. Tostmann’s
audio commentary made the especially marvelous point that the reflections both
anchor and suspend Gardner in a floating and light-filled moment.14
Hanging directly opposite this welcoming portrait, was the selection ‘Artists’
Studios,’ a grouping of paintings and etchings of artists at work. The arrangement
functioned as yet another engaging tribute to Gardner’s keen love for the arts, her
pleasure in collecting, and her hope that her Fenway Court museum would be ‘for
the education and enjoyment of the public forever.’15 The small etching Augustus
Saint-Gaudens II (1897) suggests ‘an intimate boudoir scene’ (JNN and OT, Catalog
136) with the artist in collar and cuffs seated on a bedside while behind him his
naked female model curls in the shadows created by Zorn’s clear lines. The
harmonizing diagonals in Saint-Gaudens’ posture and the woman’s torso and legs
unite the two in more than an inspirational bond. Both In Wikström’s Studio (1899)
and Self-Portrait (1889) more conventionally represent artists and their work spaces.
Zorn varies his brushstrokes and his muted monochromatic palette in his painting
of the sculptor Emil Wikström’s atelier. Thick forceful applications of grey create
the heavy clay model on the canvas’s left and lower side and enclose the nude
model who stands in the studio. The moment is private – the model seems lost in
thought. The inanimate clay and stone frame her radiant warmth, an effect Zorn
creates with softer and less visible applications of paint. Zorn’s Self-Portrait, done
ten years before, is a testament to both his artistic self-regard and his international
reputation.
Zorn painted Self-Portrait for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence which
commissioned it for its collection of artists’ self-portraits but at a time when his
career had not yet achieved the international scope it soon would. Zorn shows
himself as both painter and sculptor. The crowded composition arranges the artist
in the canvas’s right half while the left-hand foreground shows his work-inprogress, the clay bust of his wife Emma, and, behind, the back of a canvas signed
‘Zorn.’ The blended greys and beiges in Zorn’s suit, vest, clay, and canvas unite the
artist with his creations even while the ruddy pinks in his complexion and his
concentrated gaze separate him from the dull tones and blind gaze in the statue’s
face. The touch of red so noticeable in Zorn’s many paintings, appears here, too, as
a single small stroke on his lapel. It is the badge he had received recently for his
1889 induction into the French Legion of Honor.
The paintings on the third wall, labeled ‘Society Portraits,’ emphasized their female
sitters’ wealth and social standing, not unlike those by Zorn’s contemporary, John
Singer Sargent.
Zorn’s approach, however, differed significantly from the
American painter’s – his ‘quick, sweeping brushstroke’ (Curator’s Label) always
effected a vibrant animation, in startling contrast to Sargent’s ‘delicate fragility’
(Tostmann 17). Mrs. Potter Palmer (1893) shows Berthe Honoré Palmer, Chicago’s
celebrated society hostess, dressed in a shimmering gown with a long train,
crowned with a starry tiara and holding a delicate wand-like scepter, speaking
before the Board of Lady Managers of the Women’s Building at the 1893 World’s
Fair. Palmer knew Isabella Stewart Gardner and, like her Boston friend, was a keen
supporter of the arts. In 1890 she had purchased Zorn’s painting The Small Brewery,
and, when she knew he would be in Chicago as Sweden’s commissioner of fine art
for the exhibition (A-ME, Catalog 89), made sure to arrange for the portrait. The
painting’s vast scale (258 x 141.2 centimeters) emphasizes the stark contrast
between the glimmering resplendent figure and the darkened background space to
enhance the visual celebration for the ‘Empress of Chicago.’16 The portrait – not
unlike the Chicago Exhibition itself – shows the mid-west capitol as a place of
culture and advancements. A second painting, Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon (1897)
portrays Virginia Bacon, sister-in-law to railway magnate Edward Rathbone Bacon
seated with her arm around her collie dog. Zorn achieves a quiet intimacy and
dignified tone by using a soft, light palette and brushstroke. Virginia’s face is lit by
a gentle light from the right; she looks gracefully up at her viewer since Zorn
adopts a perspective a bit higher than his sitter. The Bacon family became one of
Zorn’s best American patrons and his work for them represented not only his
recognition by the American industrial elite, but another triumph over Sargent who
had painted Virginia the year before. Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon was exhibited in
the 1897 Paris Salon where Zorn’s loose and light-filled image drew high critical
acclaim (A-ME, Catalog 88).
The etchings, small studies and larger paintings that comprised the show’s fourth
section,’In the City,’ perhaps best fulfilled the exhibit’s mission and aspirations.
Tostmann claims these urban scenes – only twelve – the ‘most ambitious’ in Zorn’s
prolific career and illustrate his easy alignment with the Impressionist impulse to
paint a quotidian modernity. Most were executed when Zorn and Emma lived in
Paris from 1888-1896 (20). An exception is The Large Brewery (1890), powerful in its
diagonal line of kerchiefed women workers on the right that stretches into the
painting’s depth and that frames an empty gleaming space – perhaps the
Stockholm brewery floor – that occupies most of the composition. Night Effect
(1895), done in his singular color-combination of white, black, red, and ochre,
shows a Parisian streetwalker, not an uncommon subject for late-nineteenth
painters by any means; however, Tostmann states Zorn had his eye on an audience
less accustomed to Paris’s café and nighttime scenes. He worked the topic out in
different etched versions, two of which Gardner eventually owned (20). Positioned
as it was in the exhibit, between Zorn’s American society portraits and his other
urban scenes, the large painting created a provocative connection between subject
matter and social environment. The prostitute staggers and reaches for a tree with
her left hand while her right hitches up her red skirt, revealing her lacy petticoat.
Her overly fancy red bonnet adds to the figure’s vague immodesty – what was
often a slight crimson note in other works, is here the dominant tone. In the
background is a café’s interior. In contrast to the women in the society portraits,
the Parisian streetwalker is outside a room or home; yet, unlike the women in
Zorn’s pastoral and nature paintings, she strikes an awkward pose, exaggerated by
her tilted stance and the thick and hasty application of paint.
‘In the City’s’ crowning achievement was its showcasing of Zorn’s two finished
versions of The Omnibus, brought together in public display for the first time. This
engrossing section of the exhibit illustrated Zorn’s methodical process behind his
finished oils in scrupulous and detailed evidence, and proved his canny business
acumen about different art markets. As the scholarship has noted, Zorn loved
riding the Paris streetcars and enjoyed sitting among the riders who came from all
social classes.17 Several preliminary studies in oil and watercolor, as well as an 1892
etched version, demonstrated Zorn’s absorbed process and approach that resulted
in the first finished oil painting in 1891-1892. A group of riders sits in a diagonal
line that stretches into the canvas’s right-hand background. The young woman in
the front holds on her lap a cumbersomely large square box. Short and swift
brushstrokes evoke rather than carefully define the figures and faces. Zorn restricts
his colors to whites, greys, and, most strikingly, black, reflecting his great
admiration for Manet’s technique and palette.18 Pleased with the painting and its
Paris reception, in late 1892 Zorn began the second version with a different
audience and venue in mind: Chicago’s 1893 Exposition. Set side-by-side with the
first version, the second shows significant differences. The smooth brushstroke
produces careful and specific details in the figures’ postures and faces, especially
that of the young woman in the foreground who is prettier, more refined, and, no
longer alone in the foreground holding the oversize box, sits in a relaxed pose
between a partially hidden male passenger and a female rider (also prettier). The
rough white rectangular box has become more manageable – cylindrical and bound
by a gleaming leather strap. The impressionistic black patches have evaporated,
transformed into warmer and more varied tones; the vaguely rendered windows
and interior are now sharper clearer panes and wooden frames
The Omnibus, 1892 (oil on canvas),
Zorn, Anders Leonard (1860-1920) / © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA / The Bridgeman
Art Library
This version of the painting plays a significant part in the Zorn and Gardner
hagiographies. As Sweden’s commissioner of fine art for the Chicago World’s Fair,
Zorn was in the United States to curate the great number of works on loan for the
Exposition. Gardner, too, was in the city, having lent her picture of Saint Denis
Cathedral by Paul Helleu for the momentous occasion. She saw The Omnibus, loved
it, and bought it immediately for $1600 (OT, Catalog 98). Thus, began their long
and stimulating friendship.
Despite his affluent urbanity, Zorn spent many months each year in Stockholm and
Mora, remaining loyal to ‘the peasant culture from which he came’ (Facos 3). He
became pivotal in Sweden’s National Romanticism’s efforts to create a ‘collective
awareness of Sweden’s unique and diverse natural and cultural heritages’ (6) by
preserving its folklore and culture. He encouraged local crafts and arts production.
He collected costumes and musical instruments and assisted in building a concert
hall for lectures and performances of Swedish folk dance and music (9). According
to Arvid Nyholm, a former student who visited Zorn in 1914 at his small home
outside Mora, the artist who ‘reveled in the exclusive international social circles of
industrial magnates and aristocrats throughout his life,’ who could name Sweden’s
King Oscar II not only as a portrait subject but also a ‘favorite sailing companion’
(Facos 3), sat contentedly ‘whittling little wooden spoons,’ savoring a simple life
‘where everybody eats his porridge from a pewter plate with a wooden spoon and
sleeps naked under a white, soft sheepskin cover in his bed in the wall’ (Nyholm
470).
The exhibit’s fifth arrangement, ‘Rural Life,’ emphasized this abiding fidelity. It
was one of the show’s loveliest groupings that included The Ice Skater, notable as
both a first in the ice-skating genre to depict the activity at night and as an
experiment in shadows for Zorn (Tostmann 110; 113). The Ice Skater’s stunning
asymmetrical composition privileges a slightly higher point-of-view; we look down
at the single female skater who stands (or leans) at a mild angle in the left
foreground while shadows and unfocused shapes swirl on the ice and into the
night behind her. Despite his dismay about The Ice Skater’s weak critical reception,
Zorn loved this painting which he made that winter in Mora. Included here, too,
were several works that show his light and graceful touch with nudes, a subject he
began to explore in 1891 during a summer idyll in the Swedish countryside. The
nude-in-nature image became a particularly potent symbol for Sweden’s National
Romanticism’s vision.
In Zorn’s hands, the subject becomes something more,
circumventing the erotic and epitomizing the transcendent link between man and
the natural world (Facos 6).19 Opal (1891), for instance, with its two women who
recline amid a river bank’s leafy and sun-dappled greenery, romanticizes the
conventional nineteenth-century female nude and rejects the New Woman’s fin-desiècle metropolitan independence.20 This lyrical simplicity is most evident in
Morning Toilet (or With His Mother), the 1888 oil that became part of Isabella Stewart
Gardner’s collection in 1896.
Unlike the thick-impasto surface and short
brushstroke technique he uses in Opal, Zorn applies his thinned oils with delicate
and sheer brushstrokes.
The Morning Toilet, 1888 (oil on canvas), Z
orn, Anders Leonard (1860-1920) / © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA / The Bridgeman Art
Library
Working en plein air demanded Zorn paint quickly, and Morning Toilet’s glints and
glimmers of light reflect off the surface of the lake. The equally luminous rocks
along the shore embrace the nude woman who stands quietly in the water and
leans down tenderly to steady her small rosy child. The image is naturally serene;
the young mother and her child unself-conscious and content.
Without question, ‘Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America’ provided a
pleasurably informative survey of Zorn’s oeuvre, most especially in the strong
curatorial design that anchored all five of the distinct subject categories.
The
exhibit cultivated the solid understanding that Zorn’s fluency with genre, media,
and technique, his experiments with composition and light, and his intelligent yet
voluptuous eye for detail were consistent throughout his professional life. Various
descriptive signs and label cards offered the basic information standard to any
museum’s display; the succinct audio guide augmented that printed information in
limited fashion. Those wishing for more will find the handsome reproductions and
scholarly essays in the exhibition catalog richly satisfying particularly as the
scrupulous attention the contributors pay to Zorn’s life and work fill in the many
unfortunate – but, perhaps, inevitable – blanks in the show.
Despite, however, the show’s heartfelt mission and skillful presentation, its lasting
effect lingers as generally neutral. Most awkward was the unwitting paradox that
this show constructed between two visions for a public museum: Isabel Stewart
Gardner’s idiosyncratic and privately funded dream and the Museum’s
unavoidably more corporate and commercial objective. Aside from the whimsical
intimacy established by the gallery’s opening room and the strategically placed
Venice portrait, the exhibit registered as tepidly cautious. The show lacked an
exuberant and sensuous joy, i.e., those qualities Gardner evoked so skillfully in
installations with many works the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum had selected
and then rearranged for its own purposes in the recent display. As Alan Chong has
noted, Gardner’s Fenway Court provided a totality in contrast to the ‘cold, isolating
experiences provided by modern museums, which lacked emotion and failed to
interact with the other arts.
The Gardner Museum’s multisensory experience
prevented visitors from analyzing any individual object in an intellectual fashion’
(‘Museum of Myth 216). Paintings such as The Omnibus, Morning Toilet, and Isabella
Stewart Gardner in Venice – all owned by Gardner – first hung in the sumptuous
spaces of Gardner’s Back Bay home and, later, in those of Fenway Court. Those
interested are strongly encouraged to turn to Anne-Marie Eze’s splendid essay,
‘Zorn in Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s ‘Faithful Painter’,’ that makes superb
use of original photographs that document the shifting places these specific
paintings occupied within those richly ornamented interiors and explains
Gardner’s meticulous eye for aesthetic harmony in textures, shapes, and natural
light. Of course, Tostmann’s exhibit did not (and could never) attempt to recreate
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s arrangements.
Anyone wishing to indulge in the
intoxications of the ‘treasure-trove’ in what Trevor Fairbrother has called the
‘knowing eclecticism of Mrs. Gardner’s installations’ (575) can stroll through the
gleaming glass corridor that joins the new wing’s easy neutrality to the original
building’s lush aesthetic. Nonetheless, the show seemed erroneously titled for the
America it claimed it would ‘seduce’ very well might be still in thrall to the
‘suggestive, nonexpository museum’ (‘Museum of Myth 219) of its formidable
founder.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank M.T. Sharif for his keen proofreading commentary of this review’s
initial draft.
My special thanks to the College of General Studies at Boston
University and Deans Natalie McKnight and Megan Sullivan for their assistance in
providing funding for reproduction rights. All images used with the permission
and courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library in New York in conjunction with the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Let me add my gratitude to Tom Haggerty of
the Bridgeman for his patience in helping me with the permissions process.
Works Cited
‘Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America, February 28 to May 13, 2013.’
Cur. Oliver Tostmann. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston. 3 May 2013.
Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America, February 28-May 13, 2013. Web.
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/collection/exhibitions/__exhibitions/anders__zorn. 21 June 2013.
Carter, Morris. Isabella Stewart Gardner. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1925.
Chong, Alan. ‘Anders Zorn (1860-1920).’ ‘The Palazzo Barbaro Circle.’ McCauley,
Chong, Zorzi, and Lingner. 271-272.
---. ‘Artistic Life in Venice.’ McCauley, Chong, Zorzi, and Lingner. 87-128.
---. ‘Mrs. Gardner’s Museum of Myth.’ Museums: Crossing Boundaries. Spec. issue
of Anthropology and Aesthetics 52 (2007): 212-220. JSTOR. Web. 13 May 2013.
---. ‘Mrs. Gardner’s Two Silver Boxes by Christian Eriksson and Anders Zorn.’
Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 8 (2003): 222-229. JSTOR. Web. 12 May 2013.
Eze, Anne-Marie. ‘Zorn in Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s ‘Faithful Painter.’’
Tostmann, 55-65.
Facos, Michelle. Swedish Impressionism’s Boston Champion: Anders Zorn and
Isabella Stewart Gardner, May 4 to August 22, 1993. Exhibition Catalog. Boston:
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1993.
---.
‘’The Unstudied, Unposed Naturalness of Life’: Zorn’s Bather Paintings.’
Tostmann, 41-53.
Fairbrother, Trevor. ‘Museums in Massachusetts: Boston and Cambridge, MA.’
Review. The Burlington Magazine 146.1217 (2004): 575-577. JSTOR. Web. 12 May
2013.
Hawley, Anne. ‘Director’s Foreward.’ Tostmann, 7.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. ‘A Sentimental Traveler: Isabella Stewart Gardner in
Venice.’ McCauley, Chong, Zorzi, and Lingner. 3-51.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, Alan Chong, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and Richard
Lingner. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Boston:
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004.
Nyholm, Arvid. ‘Anders Zorn: The Artist and the Man.’ Fine Arts Journal 31.4
(1914): 469-481. JSTOR. Web. 13 May 2013.
Shand-Tucci, Douglass. The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart
Gardner. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Tostmann, Oliver, ed. Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America. London:
Paul Holbertson, 2013.
---. ‘Anders Zorn and His International Success.’ Tostmann, 13-26.
---. ‘Curator’s Forward.’ Tostmann, 8-9.
Zorn, Anders. The Morning Toilet. 1888. Oil on canvas. Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum, Boston. Reproduced by permission of the Bridgeman Art Library, New
York.
---.
Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice. 1894. Oil on Canvas. Isabella Stewart
Gardner
Museum, Boston.
Reproduced by permission of the Bridgeman Art
Library, New York.
---. The Omnibus. 1892. Oil on canvas. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
Reproduced by permission of the Bridgeman Art Library, New York.
---. Zorn and His Wife. 1890. Etching. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
Reproduced by permission of the Bridgeman Art Library, New York.
 A specialist in Victorian Literature and Culture, Joellen Masters is a senior
lecturer at Boston University. She is editor of THE LATCHKEY, a journal
of New Woman studies.
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1
Unless otherwise noted in the text, all information and
quotations
by
Michelle
Facos
refer
to
Swedish
Impressionism’s Boston Champion: Anders Zorn and Isabella
Stewart Gardner, May 4 to August 22, 1993. Facos curated
this exhibit which, as I say above and in note 6 below,
was one of only two Zorn exhibits in the United States
before this year’s at the Gardner Museum in Boston.
2
As the anonymous writer for Art in America’s obituary
remarked, in 1920 Zorn’s fame “rests upon his etchings.
His paintings are not easy to find, but the etchings are in
every public museum” (5).
3
See Oliver Tostmann’s “Curator’s Foreword,” in the
show’s catalog Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces
America. Additional citations from Tostmann’s foreword
will appear as “Curator’s Foreword” in the parenthetical
citation; references to Tostmann’s scholarly essay in the
book, “Anders Zorn and His International Success,” will
be abbreviated as “International Success.” In addition,
references to the catalog’s briefer analyses of individual
works cite the writer’s initials, Catalog and page number
– OT, for Oliver Tostmann, A-ME for Anne-Marie Eze,
and JNN for Jessica Njeri Dnungu.
4
As readers can tell, the exhibition closed shortly before
this review’s publication.
5
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/collection/exhibitions/-
__exhibitions/anders__zorn
6
The first, “Zorn, Paintings, Graphics and Sculpture,”
was in Birmingham, Alabama in 1986, and the second,
curated by Michelle Facos, was the Gardner’s 1993
exhibit, “Swedish Impressionism’s Boston Champion:
Anders Zorn and Isabella Stewart Gardner,” a show that
used only works Gardner herself had owned.
For a
listing of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s complete Zorn
holdings – paintings, drawings, letters, and so forth – see
Anders Zorn: A European Artist Seduces America, 168-187.
7
Tostmann laces this point about Zorn’s shrewd
marketing of his work throughout his finely persuasive
essay “Anders Zorn and His International Success,”
noting, for instance, that Zorn’s Paris urban genre scenes
“catered to a clientele outside France” (20).
8
As the exhibit’s audio guide – modest in its
explications and information – states, the American
popular press had coined this title for Zorn who would
make a total of six visits to the United States.
9
Gardner helped instigate Zorn’s American reputation,
spearheading his shows at Boston galleries, including his
two exhibits at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the first in
March 1894 when the museum was still in its Copley
Square location (Eze 62) and the second, in 1899 when
Gardner arranged for a show of sixteen portraits of
“American sitters” Zorn had completed during one of
his visits to Gardner in Boston (Facos 33).
10
As Alan Chong has noted, like so many others who
traveled to Venice, Zorn found it inspiring. “Gondolas
and gondoliers fascinated Zorn” and during his stay at
the Palazzo Barbaro he made many sketches and oil
studies of the canals, boats, and the men who rowed
their passengers around the watery city (“Anders Zorn
1860-1920” 271).
11
The Gardner Museum’s archives hold sixty-three
letters the Zorns wrote the Gardners, beginning in 1893
and concluding in 1923, three years after the painter’s
death. Appendix 4 in Anders Zorn: A European Artist
Seduces America reproduces all sixty-three and includes
two Gardner wrote to Zorn’s widow, now in the
archives of the Zorn Museum in Mora.
12
In 1903, when Fenway Court first opened, Gardner
placed this lovely piece in the Dutch Cabinet, stashing it
with many other silver objects, making it difficult to see
its glorious whimsy and sophisticated craftsmanship.
For a fascinating discussion of the box’s conception, see
Chong’s essay “Mrs. Gardner’s Two Silver Boxes by
Christian Eriksson and Anders Zorn.”
13
Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo
Barbaro Circle is a sumptuous collection of finely
researched and illustrated essays.
For example, Alan
Chong’s “Artistic Life in Venice” includes Emma and
Anders Zorn’s stay with the Gardners in its focus on the
busy and stimulating social circle the American couple
cultivated. Elizabeth Anne McCauley’s “A Sentimental
Traveler: Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice” describes
the Boston hostess’s love for Italy and its influence on
her collecting and on her eventual construction of
Fenway Court.
14
In the catalog’s discussion, Tostmann persuasively
explains the reflections create the sense that Gardner is
one in a larger group of dancers, and links that effect to
the maenads and their association with “eternal youth
and powers of seduction” (80).
Opinions about the
portrait’s origin vary from the charmingly anecdotal in
books such as Shand-Tucci’s The Art of Scandal: The Life
and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner, 149 and Morris
Carter’s Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court, 147 to
stringent scholarly arguments that trace influences in
Zorn’s image and describe his creative process. See in
addition to Tostmann’s discussion, Alan Chong in
Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo
Barbaro Circle, 271.
15
I take this statement from Gardner’s will from “Mrs.
Gardner’s Museum of Myth,” 214.
16
The title is one Emma Zorn assigned for the Chicago
hostess although whether her ironic remark signifies any
jealousy (Zorn was known for his sexual infidelities) is
unclear. See “Catalog,” page 89, note 5.
17
See Facos’s thoughtful essay “’The Unstudied,
Unposed Naturalness of Life’: Zorn’s Bather Paintings”
in the exhibition catalog as well as Swedish Impressionist’s
Boston Champion.
18
As she claims, like his Impressionist contemporary,
Zorn “achieved masterful results with black” (24). Facos
provides a convincing comparison between the second
version of The Omnibus and English painter William
Maw Egley’s 1889 Omnibus Life in London as a possible
influence.
19
See also “’The Unstudied, Unposed Naturalness of
Life’: Zorn’s Bather Paintings.”
20
Facos draws this observation about Zorn’s “anti-
cosmopolitanism” from Nilsen Laurvik’s study of Zorn’s
nudes. See “’The Unstudied, Unposed Naturalness of
Life’: Zorn’s Bather Paintings,” page 53.