In the Loft

In the Loft, painted in 1904 and held in the Thiel Gallery in Stockholm, belongs to a group of Zorn's works set in the vernacular farm buildings of Dalarna. The loft — a storage space above the ground floor, typically accessed by an exterior stair — was a distinctive architectural feature of Swedish farm buildings and a space of agricultural necessity that Zorn found pictorially interesting. Lit by diffused light entering through small openings, the loft interior created the kind of atmospheric conditions he had explored throughout his career. The Thiel Gallery holds an important collection of Zorn's work alongside other Swedish masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Interior farmhouse spaces challenged Zorn to work with limited, directed light — a very different condition from the open outdoor light of his lakeside Dalarna paintings. He uses the contrast between lit and shadowed areas to create spatial depth within the enclosed space, the figure emerging from surrounding darkness.