This is not a photograph, and it's not an oil painting. It might be the most unbelievable watercolor ever made...
It's called Sommarnöje, which means something like Summer Delight, and Anders Zorn painted it in 1886. Look at the water, the gentle ripples, the reflections, the wet sheen of it, and then look at the two people, the fine detail of the wooden rowboat, the woman's white dress, the light on her face.
It has the near-photographic realism of an oil painting, and it was done in watercolor, a medium so unforgiving that a single wrong stroke ruins the entire piece.
Zorn painted this in the first summer of his marriage: the woman in white waiting on the pier is his new wife, Emma, whom he had married only months before. They had just come back from their honeymoon and were staying with her family at Dalarö near Stockholm, still looking for the home where they would spend their life. The man rowing toward her is their friend Carl Gustav Dahlström. It is a real moment from the happiest season of a young couple's life, caught and held forever.
In 2010 this single sheet of watercolor sold for twenty-six million Swedish kronor, over three million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a Swedish painting.
In his own lifetime, Zorn was celebrated above all for two things: his handling of light, and his ability to paint water. Sommarnöje is where you see exactly why...
Je vous promets que je ne vais pas vous saouler pendant 15 jours avec l'Italie 😂 Une fois là bas je me ferai plutôt discrète ici je pense. Mais j'aime bien cette chanson de Matia Bazar "Solo tu". 1977 quand même 🙄
Nicolai Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky was born into a life of abject poverty, but was able to get admitted to a special peasant school by demonstrating his early prowess at drawing. Here he remembers a boy like himself, nervously about to enter the school for the first time (1897)
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