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The Luxury of Time

Do you have guests to entertain this holiday season? Then check out Idle Hours in our traveling show The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

See this painting in person at the Dallas Museum of Art through January 12, 2003.

Mowbray used every brilliant color in his palette to satisfy his wealthy Western patrons, and fantasies of the East permeate Idle Hours. Here, the artist re-creates a rich interior setting, perhaps a harem, with its cushions, flowers, and mosaic tile floor. Two ladies, lounging in richly colored robes, interrupt their mandolin playing and conversing to gaze at two turtles scuttling away at lower right. Mowbray heightens the sense of confinement by enclosing the women in a compressed space created by sofa, pillows, and the table.

Mowbray achieved fame as both a mural painter and coordinator of fancy interiors, yet was ultimately concerned with creating elegant designs rather than serious easel paintings. Encapsulating Gilded Age luxuriance, Idle Hours caught the attention of collector William T. Evans, who acknowledged that "it is a remarkable performance technically."

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000).

Pictured: H. Siddons Mowbray, 1858 Egypt–1928 USA, Idle Hours, 1895, oil, 12 x 16 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans.