Zorn Museum

The Zorn Museum in Mora holds the largest collection of work by Anders Zorn, a Swedish painter who is less known internationally than he deserves. Zorn was a virtuoso technician — his watercolours, oils, and etchings span portraiture, nudes, and scenes of rural Dalarna life — and the museum holds around 100 paintings and several hundred prints and drawings. The light in the galleries, designed for the collection, shows the work well.

The museum complex includes Zorngården, Zorn's carefully preserved home and studio just behind the museum building, and a separate open-air farmstead with 18th-century Dalarna log buildings. A combined ticket covers everything. The farmstead collection is particularly good — the painted interiors of the log buildings have been left almost untouched, and several are exactly as they appeared when Zorn collected them in the early 20th century.

things to do museum
A story
Anders Zorn was born in Mora in 1860, the illegitimate son of a German brewer and a local peasant girl. He became one of the most sought-after portrait painters in the world — painting three American presidents, including Grover Cleveland and William Howard Taft — yet chose to return to Mora and spend the rest of his life there. When he died in 1920, he left his entire estate, including his house, studio, and art collection, to the Swedish state.