Rosita Mauri was a dancer of Catalan descent who came to the Paris Opera from La Scala in Milan in 1878 with an introduction from the composer Charles Gounod. In Zorn’s watercolour, we meet the celebrated ballet dancer as she enters her dressing-room at the Paris Opera. Dressed in a light silk dress that reflects the light, she has paused in the doorway to turn and look at the viewer, her face breaking into a radiant smile. Her body has turned slightly and is shown in profile, while her head is depicted full-face. With one hand she opens the jib-door. The room beyond is flooded with a warm light; outside, the light is cooler and more subdued, and shines up at angle from below, so that Mauri’s figure casts a shadow on the wall behind. Anders Zorn is playing here with one of his favourite themes: light of different temperatures. Zorn painted the portrait in 1888, having settled that autumn in Paris with his wife Emma in a studio on the rue Daubigny. The French politician and writer Antonin Proust, who was also Mauri’s lover, had commissioned an oil portrait of himself and a portrait of Rosita Mauri, which Zorn chose instead to paint in watercolour and gouache. The painting was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. This particular watercolour is one of the artist’s largest. He did an etching of the same subject the following year.
Kristoffer Arvidsson from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
