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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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