From couples in traditional dress dancing on midsummer’s night to a naked blonde woman leading her son through rippling water, the work of Anders Zorn (1860-1920) depicts idyllic scenes that we still broadly associate with life in Scandinavia. Fearing that his country’s traditional way of life was about to disappear, like many of his European contemporaries around the turn of the twentieth century, this Swedish artist set out to chronicle life in his homeland. Zorn’s success as an artist took him all over the world, painting portraits of the great and the good. But in his Swedish work we see a cosmopolitan falling in love with home again after travelling far and wide.

Anders Zorn is still well known in Sweden, but he has largely escaped the attention of the public in the rest of Europe. This autumn Kunstmuseum Den Haag will bring together 150 paintings, watercolours and etchings in the first retrospective of his work in the Netherlands, organised in collaboration with Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Zorn Museum in Mora.