Zorn painted three sitting American presidents: Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. For a Swedish painter from a small town in Dalarna, the commissions represented an extraordinary international reach, built on a reputation as one of the finest portrait painters and etchers of his generation.

He was born in Mora in 1860, studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, and worked across Paris, London and the United States. His ability to render water and flesh with loose, confident brushwork set him apart from more academic contemporaries. His etchings, numbering roughly three hundred, are considered among the finest of the period.

He returned to Mora later in life, establishing a museum and open-air museum there. The Zorn Museum remains a major cultural institution in Sweden. He died in Mora in 1920, at sixty.