Midsummer Dance
Couples dancing in Mora during the light midsummer night. Zorn was known for his quick, assured brushwork and his pictures from Dalarna.
The light is cool and blue – it is night but never dark. Zorn often used only four colours.
Anders Zorn painted Midsummer Dance in 1897. The year before, he had left Paris and moved home to Mora in Dalarna, where he had grown up. He was already internationally known as a portrait painter and etcher, but now he devoted himself more and more to subjects from his home district: rural life, local girls of Dalarna and women bathing. The painting belongs to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Zorn was born in Mora in 1860 and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. In the 1880s and 1890s he lived in London and Paris and travelled widely, including to the United States, where he painted portraits of wealthy collectors and of several presidents. He was also one of the most successful etchers of his day.
The picture shows a midsummer night. Couples dance on a lawn in front of red log houses, and the maypole can be seen in the background. In the foreground a couple whirls past, the woman’s skirt and the moving bodies captured in a few vigorous strokes. The people wear folk costume and everyday clothes. It is night, but the sky is still light.
The composition is full of movement. The couples overlap, and the figures at the very front are cropped, almost as in a photograph. The eye is drawn from the dancers in the foreground towards the maypole and the houses. Zorn was interested in photography and sometimes used his own photographs as an aid.
Light is the main subject. The twilight of the midsummer night gives a cool, bluish-grey light in which colours are muted and contours softened. Against this stand a few warmer touches, such as red and white details in the clothing. Zorn often worked with a very limited palette, in which white, black, ochre and red could be enough to create the whole range of tones. He liked to paint outdoors, directly in front of his subject. The light of the midsummer night changes constantly, which required him to work quickly and decisively.
The painting is executed in oil on canvas with a quick, assured brush. The brushstrokes are clearly visible, and details are suggested rather than drawn out. It recalls Impressionism, which Zorn had encountered in Paris, but he retained a firmer draughtsmanship and more realistic forms.
The work has often been interpreted as an image of a Swedish folk tradition, and it has helped make the midsummer celebration a national symbol. Around the turn of the century there was a strong interest in peasant culture, and Zorn himself collected old buildings and objects in Mora. At the same time the picture is not a documentary record but an artistic arrangement of light and movement.
Midsummer Dance is one of Zorn’s best-known paintings and one of the Nationalmuseum’s most popular. It has been reproduced in large numbers and often appears when Swedish midsummer is to be illustrated. Zorn’s home and studio in Mora are today part of the Zorn Museum.