Anders Zorn

By the 1890s a farmer's son from the Swedish province of Dalarna was one of the most in-demand portraitists in the world. Anders Zorn had started in watercolour, so quick and sure with the brush that he could catch a face or a wet reflection in a few strokes, and he carried that speed into oil.

The commissions took him far from Sweden. He painted three American presidents, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt, and moved among bankers and industrialists on both sides of the Atlantic. His etchings alone would have made his name.

But he kept going home. In Mora, his village in Dalarna, he painted local women bathing outdoors in cold northern light, the water broken into flecks of colour, and he collected the region's folk costumes and old buildings. He and his wife Emma left their house and fortune to the Swedish state, and the Zorn collections in Mora still hold the largest gathering of his work.