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Dimensions: 120.5 by 91.5cm., 47½ by 36in.
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Provenance: E. Malmström (by 1930)
Galerie Fritzes Kungl. Hovbokhandel, Stockholm (by 1938)
Sale: Stockholms Auktionsverk, Stockholm, 4 December 2002, lot 1625
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner
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Exhibited:
Buenos Aires, 1911
Stockholm, Liljevalchs Konsthall, Carl Larsson - Bruno Liljefors - Anders Zorn , 1930, no. 289
Motala, Mitt bästa konstverk , 1941
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A SWEDISH PRIVATE COLLECTION
Towards the turn of the century, Zorn became increasingly interested in the history and ancient traditions of his native village of Mora and its wider cultural territories, which at the time, as a result of industrialisation and urbanisation, were beginning to disappear. In 1905 he bought an ancient cabin, which he moved to Gopsmor, a parish north-west of Mora. The simple, ritualistic way of life of the local people, with whom he felt a deep affinity, and the geographical isolation of Gopsmor, became for him a refuge.
The serene yet wild character of the surrounding landscape provided Zorn with the backdrop to many of his depictions of nudes, enabling him to explore his ideas of showing them in a natural environment, in spontaneous action, rather than approaching the subject in the studio, painting contrived poses. In the 1906-09 series especially, he placed his young models deep in the forest amongst saplings by a tarn or brook, as in the present work. In his earlier nudes, painted in the archipelago in the spirit of the prevalent open-air vitalism, Zorn tended to dissolve the figure into the landscape by the use of colour and a flickering brushwork. His strong feeling for the solidity of forms, enhanced by his work as a sculptor, gradually led to an evolution towards an increasingly sculptural conception of the human body in his paintings.
Inspired by Swedish folklore and the growing influence of National Romanticism, he often gave his work titles derived from Nordic sagas, mythology or pagan myth, thus transforming his nudes into nymphs, dryads or woodsprites. In addition to the stylistic difference to his earlier works, the paintings from Gopsmor thus take on a symbolic, albeit primitive meaning, lacking in his earlier paintings. The name Ingeborg refers to the Icelandic saga of Fritiof and Ingeborg, a cycle of poems dating from around 1300, which enjoyed a revival in the nineteenth century.
