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Self-Portrait with Five Muses
Henry Church (American, 1836–1908)
c. 1880
- Medium
- oil on paper mounted to board
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Unframed: 73.3 x 59.7 cm (28 7/8 x 23 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- United States, Ohio, Cleveland
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, American Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Delia E. Holden Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Lifelong Chagrin Falls resident Church is considered one of the great self-taught artists of 19th-century America. A painter, sculptor, and musician by passion, he offered his appearance and enthusiasms in this highly imaginative self-portrait, surrounding himself with a squadron of miniature winged muses. These figures represent not only the traditional arts of painting, sculpture, and music, but also Church's profession of blacksmithing (identified as a crowned figure holding a hammer and anvil). A savvy entrepreneur, Church launched the first commercial art gallery in northeast Ohio: Church's Art Museum, at Geauga Lake, in 1888. Its inventory consisted entirely of his own work.
