Anders Zorn – Midsummer Dance, 1897 | Giclée Print

Couples turn round a maypole hung with a Swedish flag while musicians and onlookers in traditional Dalarna dress crowd the grass around them; behind the dancers a red farmhouse catches the low, warm light of the Nordic midsummer night, hours from any real darkness. Zorn painted the scene after sunset in June and July 1897, working fast in the long summer twilight to hold the light he wanted.

He had returned to his native Dalarna the year before and thrown himself into preserving the region's folk culture — he had just given the village of Mora a new maypole of its own. This canvas is less an outdoor genre scene than a record of a festival he was actively trying to keep alive.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Nationalmuseum's own photograph of the painting. It is not a painting and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 140 × 98 cm — oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

• 40 × 50 cm / 15.7 × 19.7 in — reduced, 0.31× original. Image 30.00 × 41.32 cm.
• 50 × 70 cm / 19.7 × 27.6 in — reduced, 0.41× original. Image 40.00 × 55.09 cm.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, centred on the sheet. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

Provenance
Anders Zorn (Swedish, 1860–1920), Midsommardans (Midsummer Dance), 1897, oil on canvas. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. NM 1603. Given by Konstakademien, with a contribution from the merchant Pontus Fürstenberg and his wife Göthilda Fürstenberg.

Where this comes from
The museum file, the measurements, and what we are allowed to sell: the record for this sheet.

Further reading
Why This Print Is Not Bigger