Omnibus

By the early 1890s Anders Zorn had left Sweden for Paris, and what caught him there was the new artificial light spilling along the boulevards after dark. This is a horse-drawn omnibus, the shared public carriage that middle-class Parisians rode home in, and Zorn painted the interior as a study in strangers not looking at each other. The young woman in front holds a small square box on her lap; behind her the other passengers keep to themselves, jostled together yet apart in the flickering evening light. He worked the scene twice. This canvas is the first attempt at it, the one he showed in Paris in 1892; a second, more finished version crossed the Atlantic to Boston, bought by the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner at the Chicago World's Fair the next year.