Sommarnöje

He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm from 1875 to 1880, and then spent time travelling in Europe, painting watercolours and society portraits in London, Paris and Madrid.

The completed watercolour captures a fleeting moment, and shows influence from the works of the French Impressionists that Zorn had seen while in Paris, but with a distinctively austere Scandinavian palette.

The painting depicts the artist's wife Emma Zorn standing in a white dress and hat, waiting on the edge of a wooden pier beside the water, as their friend Carl Gustav Dahlström approaches in a rowing boat.

The figures, pier, boat and sea are finely rendered, almost as if the work was made in oil paint, showing Zorn's skill as a watercolourist.

The previous record of SEK 22 million was set in 1990, for August Strindberg's 1892 oil painting Underlandet [sv; pl] ("Wonderland").