Our Daily Bread

The watercolour exists because Nationalmuseum asked for it. The museum had urged Zorn to take up a subject of national life, and he answered with a scene from Dalarna — a family around its food, with the painter’s own relatives as the models and his grandmother nearest the viewer, and with everyone dressed by him in older costume so that the picture reads as a custom already slipping out of use. It is the work in which the sharp, close-to-life naturalism Zorn had absorbed in France and England is turned on Swedish material, and the museum’s own account of it treats that transfer as the point: the training is cosmopolitan, the subject is of the parish. Painted in 1886, it belongs to the years in which Zorn moved from international prize-winning to a settled reputation as the foremost painter of his generation in Sweden. It is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.