Send an ecard of this image

Enchanted Vision

The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens on Saturday, May 18th at the Long Island Museum of American Art, History, and Carriages in Stonybrook, New York.

Our traveling show captures the brilliance of turn-of-the-century society and a new current of sophistication in America. The exhibition includes sixty major artworks by the most important artists of the day, including Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent.

A standout in the exhibition, Music by Thomas Wilmer Dewing presents a visual lullaby that evokes sound with its gold tones. A trance-like solitude surrounds these two women, posed like muses in a setting suggestive of an arbor or classical ruin. In the late nineteenth century, music and painting were often linked as meditative experiences, and many of Dewing's works feature women sharing the companionship afforded by the liberal and fine arts, whether reading, playing music, or painting.

Source: Richard Murray. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1851–1938, Music, about 1895, oil, 42 1/2 x 36 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.