Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Sketch for the Mural at Oberlin College, "The Spirit of Self-Sacrificing Love"
Kenyon Cox (born Warren, OH 1856-died New York City 1919)
ca. 1914
- Medium
- oil and pencil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 11 7/8 x 15 1/4 in. (30.2 x 38.8 cm.)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Ambrose Lansing
- 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
In late 1913, Oberlin College commissioned Kenyon Cox to decorate the new administration building on the campus with a mural in memory of his father, Jacob Dolson Cox. The elder Cox had been governor of Ohio and secretary of the Interior under President Grant, and Cox designed a decorative tablet listing his father’s accomplishments for a small vestibule. After he completed the project, the administrators wanted Cox to come up with another design to complement it. He decided to include a tribute to his mother, Helen Finney Cox, who had made a name for herself in Ohio as a promoter of social work. This study shows Cox’s plan for a lunette titled “The Spirit of Self-Sacrificing Love,” based on what he described as his mother’s “Biblical charity.” Cox’s depiction of a laurel-crowned, winged figure holding a glowing torch pleased university administrators, who adopted it as the official seal on college publications. (Morgan, Kenyon Cox, 1856-1919: A Life in American Art, 1994)
