Divertimento estivo

Zorn was 26 when he made this in 1886, and still a watercolourist above all. It was the medium that had made his name, and he pushed it to do things, the wet shimmer of water and the flash of sun on skin, that painters usually reserved for oil. Within a year or two he would largely set watercolour aside and work in oil for the rest of his life, so sheets like this belong to the end of his first manner. The Swedish title, Sommarnoje, means a summer retreat by the water, the seasonal escape to the archipelago that Swedes of his day took for granted. That is what he shows here, a bathing scene in the bright, even light of a northern summer.