Senator Billy Mason

Anders Zorn (1860-1920) was internationally one of the most famous artists of his era. Particularly popular in the USA, which he visited seven times and where he painted the portraits of  three presidents, Zorn is often compared with his equally brilliant near contemporary, rival and friend, John Singer Sargent. Of humble origins - he was the illegitimate son of a German brewer and Swedish peasant - he grew up with his grandparents in rural Sweden. His incredible artistic talent was already widely known when he was in his teens. Zorn made a shrewd marriage to Emma Lamm, who came from a wealthy Jewish merchant family and was interested in art and travel. 

Zorn's work can best be characterised as 'modernistic' and 'impressionistic' without going the whole hog. But what led to tremendous popularity in the 'gilded age' brought in turn a savage modernist backlash, and just like Sargent, Zorn was absurdly underrated in the mid 20th century. Although he has still some way to go to recover his international fame and reputation, he is revered and valued - both intellectually and commercially - in his native Sweden. 

While he was best known for his paintings, his etchings were tremendously popular as both 'entry level' Zorns, and lovely objects in their own right. They fetched higher prices than Rembrandts in his lifetime - which coincided with the height of the Etching Revival - and never fell entirely out of favour. He made nearly 300 in his lifetime. Many related to paintings, both watercolour and oil. Turning to oil painting in the early 1890s helped liberate Zorn's hitherto fairly tight and fastidious etching style. As Douglas Hyland writes, 'Zorn was concerned with the effect of light not only to achieve a sense of mood but of motion...'. One of his near contemporaries, curator H.P. Rossitter of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, believed 'Zorn has succeeded better than any of his predecessors in suggesting by layers of lines that evanescence of light and air which, under changing condition of sun and shadow, wrap the body like an invisible cloak'.

Zorn's female nudes constitute a robust and important area of his oeuvre, both in paintings and print. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms Zorn's kulla or dalakulla, an unmarried woman or girl from Dalecarlia, as the women were called in the local dialect of the region in Sweden where Zorn lived.

In her essay 'Anders Zorn's Etched Portraits of American Men, or the Trouble with French Masculinity', Professor Hollis Clayson writes of Zorn's 'signature attainment as a portraits of prominent American leaders'. She looks closely at this etching, and states: 'During the artist's fourth trip to the United States, [Senator Billy] Mason sat for Zorn in his studio in Chicago in 1900. Placed in a non-specific place, rather than in an office or study, the pudgy Senaotor Mason with hooded eyes is a study in forceful concentration.' She notes 'the intensity of his oblique gaze, his beefy body and disarraged hair', while at the same time 'Zorn has given Mason a steady and statesmanlike mien... Mason's worn countenance, pursed lips and the upright axis of the head help to build the impression of a deadly serious man concentrating ferociously on behalf, we presume, of his constituency. Zorn has managed to fashion a likeness that aggregates formality and informality in one body. The generalized setting also makes Mason less specifically American, more of a thoughtful statesman <em>tout court</em>. Zorn's intense Billy Mason exemplies a newly widespread, transnational norm of bourgeois masculinity at the turn of the century that emphasized single-minded immersion in work.' (p. 188).

Mason served for two stints as Senator for Illinois, opposing both the imperialism of President McKinley and the internationalism of President Woodrow Wilson. He was also apparently the originator of a new style in waistcoat that was peculiarly adaopted to stout people and to very warm weather. While not apparent in Zorn's portrait, the waistcoat is a wonderful, almost abstract weave of the etching needle's lines.

See:

Hollis Clayson, 'Anders Zorn's Etched Portraits of American Men, or the Trouble with French Masculinity', in Temma Balducci et al (eds), <em>Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France 1789-1914 </em>(Farnham, UK, 2010), pp. 177-95.

Douglas Hyland and Hans Henri Brummer, <em>Zorn: Paintings, Graphics and Sculpture </em>(Birmingham, AL, 1986).

Catherine Sawinski, 'From the collection: Anders Zorn returns to Sweden', Milwaukee Art Museum Blog, https://blog.mam.org/2016/07/12/from-the-collection-anders-zorn-returns-to-sweden/

Wikipedia, 'Anders Zorn', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Zorn

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   July 2018