Homage to a Jazz-Age Legend

Today marks the 1896 birth of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great chronicler of the 1920s.

Fitzgerald, known for his extravagant lifestyle and glamorous wife Zelda Sayre, turned his youthful experiences into enduring novels and short stories about the age of prosperity, prohibition, and flappers.

In addition to coining the decade's moniker, the "Jazz Age," Fitzgerald is famous for his literary masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. The following passage from the novel describes a high-society party at Jay Gatsby's estate in Long Island. It captures the story's themes of privilege and materialism as well as the subject of our featured artwork, Jazz–the New Possession.

"There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the corners—and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between the numbers people were doing 'stunts' all over the garden while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage 'twins'—who turned out to be girls in yellow—did a baby act in costume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn."

Pictured: Blanding Sloan, 1886–1975, Jazz–the New Possession, about 1925, color woodcut on paper, 11 3/4 x 8 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by Emily Tuckerman and Charles Albert.