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Portrait of a Lady
Thomas Wilmer Dewing (born Boston, MA 1851-died New York City 1938)
ca. 1895
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 24 x 20 in. (60.9 x 50.8 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Mollie Chatfield came to be known as a classic “Dewing girl,” a type described in a Boston paper as “intellectual enough to be worthy of Boston, aristocratic enough to be worthy of Philadelphia, well dressed enough to be a New Yorker but seldom pretty enough to evoke the thought of Baltimore.” Thomas Wilmer Dewing showed her with a flirtatious sideward glance, lips slightly parted, and one hand resting self-consciously over her breast. This provocative pose hints at the romantic relationship between artist and model. Dewing’s patron Charles Lang Freer helped the artist keep his affair with Chatfield hidden from his wife, Maria Oakey Dewing. (Hobbs, Beauty Reconfigured: The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1996)
