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Grover Cleveland, 1899
Anders Zorn.
The National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
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However, Sargent had at least one superb
example of twentieth-century Presidential Impressionism
before him when he arrived in 1903 for the Roosevelt assignment.
The great Swedish master Anders Zorn (1860-1920) had been
there before him, painting Grover Cleveland in 1899 (Zorn
returned to the White House in 1912 to paint William Howard
Taft). Far from choosing a classical or "power"
pose, Zorn shows the portly Cleveland seated by a window,
pausing in his perusal of some picture books that lie
open before him on a table, obviously in the residential
part of the White House. The painting is executed with
Zorn's well-known dash and vigor, with an amazingly bright
and vivid palette. If anything, we are given Cleveland
the sensualist and lover of fine things. No Roman power
here.
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