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Young Girl Seated
Thomas Wilmer Dewing (born Boston, MA 1851-died New York City 1938)
1896
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 20 1/8 x 16 1/8 in. (51.1 x 40.9 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
Thomas Wilmer Dewing painted many images of young, elegant women who gaze away from the viewer as if lost in thought. The delicate brushstrokes in this painting emphasize the soft, gauzy material of the girl’s dress, and her skin appears pale against the dark background, creating a sense of fragility and tenderness. Dewing was surrounded by strong women—his wife was an artist and suffragist and his daughter was “headstrong”—and his idyllic images of ladies at leisure suggest that he was responding to the changing role of women at the turn of the twentieth century. (Hobbs, Beauty Reconfigured, 1996)
