But Zorn is also too sincere not to paint what he sees.  Some of his models are of the earth, earthy; others step toward you with the candid majesty of a Brunhilda, naked, unashamed, and regal.  They are all vital.  We recall, too, the expressions, shocked, amazed, even dazed, of some American art students who, fresh from their golden Venetian dreams, faced the uncompromising pictures of a man who had faced the everyday life of his day.  For these belated visionaries, whose ideal in art is to painfully imitate Giorgione, Titian, or Tiepolo, this modern, with his rude assault upon the nerves, must seem a very iconoclast.  Yet Zorn only attempts to reproduce the life encircling him.  He is a child of his age.  He, too, has a perception of beauty, but it is the beauty that may be found by the artist with an ardent, unspoiled gaze, the curious, disquieting beauty of our time.  Whistler saw it in old Venetian doorways as well as down Chelsea way or at Rotherhithe.  Zorn sees it in some corner of a wood, in some sudden flex of muscle or intimate firelit interior.  And he loves to depict the glistening curves of his big model as she stands in the sunlight, a solid reproach to physical and moral anaemia.  A pagan, by Apollo!

As an etcher the delicacy of his sheathed lion’s paw is the principal quality that meets the eye, notwithstanding the broad execution.  Etching is essentially an impressionistic art.  Zorn is an impressionist among etchers.  He seems to attack his plate not with the finesse of a meticulous fencing-master but like a Viking, with a broad Berserker blade.  He hews, he hacks, he gashes.  There is blood in his veins, and he does not spare the ink.  But examine closely these little prints—­some of them miracles of printing—­and you may discern their delicate sureness, subtlety, and economy of gesture.  Fitzroy Carrington quotes the Parisian critic Henri Marcel, who among other things wrote of the Zorn etchings:  “Let us only say that these etchings—­paradoxical in their coarseness of means and fineness of effect—­manifest the master at his best.”

Coarseness of means and fineness of effect—­the phrase is a happy one.  Coarse is sometimes the needle-work of Zorn, but the end justifies the means.  He is often cruel, more cruel than Sargent.  His portraits prove it.  He has etched all his friends, some of whom must have felt honoured and amused—­or else offended.  The late Paul Verlaine, for example, would not have been pleased with the story of his life as etched by the Swede.  It is as biting a commentary—­one is tempted to say as acid—­as a page from Strindberg.  Yes, without a touch of Strindberg’s mad fantasy, Zorn is kin to him in his ironic, witty way of saying things about his friends and in front of their faces.  Consider that large plate of Renan.  Has any one so told the truth concerning the ex-seminarian, casuist, and marvellous prose writer of France?  The large, loosely modelled head with its fleshy curves, its super-subtle mouth of orator,