A Toast in the Idun Society

The Idun Society was founded in Stockholm in 1856 as a club where writers, artists and scientists could meet one another, and it still exists to promote relations between people from a variety of cultural fields. Zorn painted one of its evenings, and the man raising his glass is the librarian Harald Wieselgren, one of the society’s founders. The museum’s own account of the canvas calls it one of the best examples of his ability to seize what photographers would later call the decisive moment — the fraction of a second in which a scene is completely itself. Zorn was born in 1860 at Mora in Dalarna and had come to Stockholm as a boy; by the early 1890s his portraits had made him one of the best-known painters in Europe, though this small picture keeps the informality of a room of friends, everything in a warm half-light with the light gathered on the glasses and the shirt-fronts. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.