Like his contemporary Captain Hook, Anders Zorn, also a sailing man, was never so daunting as when he grew excessively modest or polite. That is supposed to be the truest sign of breeding, but Anders had no breeding, in the usual sense, at all. During one of his trips to the United States, in October of 1900, The Chicago Chronicle related how a certain “Miss Newrich” had approached the “painter-prince” with the words, “Oh, Mr. Zorn, you come from Sweden, don’t you? It is a great pleasure to meet you, all our better class of servants come from there.” Anders, one gathers, merely bowed; but when he checked in at the Schenley in Pittsburgh and was queried as to his origins, he turned to his entourage and inquired, “Where do I come from?” Somebody suggested “Everywhere,” but the escape was declined; Anders faced the clerk and said, “Nowhere.”

It was the truth. Nowhere was Anders’s hometown. But just as every family is very old if you look closely enough into the matter, so Nowhere has many more interesting people than Somewhere, if only because it is so much bigger. What is most compelling, even exemplary, in the strange life of Anders Zorn is his fidelity to a past that might have seemed, to anyone else in his place, only a dark receding sea of humiliation. He took everything in mythic stride, like a boy in seven-league boots, and ended by putting his own Nowhere very distinctly on the