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Another Opening!

Our traveling exhibition The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Gilded Age captures the brilliance of turn-of-the-century society and a new current of sophistication in America. The show includes sixty major artworks by the most important artists of the day, including Virgin Enthroned by Abbott Handerson Thayer.

Thayer's children—Mary in the center, Gerald and Gladys at her sides—served as models for this reinterpretation of a Renaissance Madonna. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece of religious painting. Although it appears to be painted casually, the faces are carefully described. When asked about his idealized figures, Thayer said, ³Few people understand what they should mean by idealization. What makes a work of art [is] this mark of sacrificing the realness of certain details to that of the loved one's. It goes far to describe art to say it is a record of worship, alias love.²

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

Pictured: Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849–1921, Virgin Enthroned, 1891, oil, 72 5/8 x 52 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.