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Study for "Science Instructing Industry"
Kenyon Cox (born Warren, OH 1856-died New York City 1919)
1898
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 16 x 20 in. (40.7 x 50.8 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 the late nineteenth century, artists decorated America’s public buildings with murals that were meant to teach moral and civic lessons to visitors passing through the halls. Many artists chose mythological or allegorical scenes. In this study, Kenyon Cox represented industry as a muscular young man and science as a laurel-crowned, toga-clad woman. The ruddy skin of the male figure contrasts sharply with the white toga and milky skin of the goddess, a choice Cox made so that the figures, posed closely together, would read clearly from a distance in the finished mural. Cox believed that mythological figures provided more beautiful decoration than figures dressed in contemporary clothes. He once wrote that “The painter who cares greatly for the expressiveness of the body will feel little attraction to belt buckles and brass buttons” (Morgan, Keepers of Culture, 1989).
