IMG_2623

Musidora

 

•Artist: Thomas Sully (American, Horncastle, Lincolnshire 1783-1872 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

•Date: 1813-35

•Medium: Oil on wood

•Dimensions: 28⅛ × 22½ in. (71.4 × 57.2 cm)

•Classification: Paintings

•Credit Line: Gift of Louis Allston Gillet, in memory of his uncles, Sully Gillet and Lorenzo M. Gillet, 1921

•Accession Number: 21.48

 

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 733.

 

Painted in Sully’s most succulent, painterly manner, “Musidora” is his only known nude. Inspired by James Thomson’s poem Summer (1727), it is at once chaste and erotic, a combination that had great appeal for contemporary Victorian audiences. Sully depicts the modest Musidora at the moment her suitor, Damon, discovers her bathing in the forest. His gentlemanly conduct so impresses her that she pledges her love for him at once. The subject was painted by many artists of the day, but Sully’s interpretation, in which the unwitting viewer plays the role of Damon, is compellingly unique.

 

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

 

•Signature:

o[At Lower Left]: TS (monogram) 1835

o[On the Back]: Begun in 1815—fin[i]shed in 1835 TS [monogram]

 

Provenance

 

The artist, until 1844; Lewis Warrington Gillet, Baltimore and New York, by 1844-died 1858; his wife, Mrs. Lewis (Ann Isobella) Warrington Gillet, New York, by 1896; their grandson, Louis A. Gillet, New York, until 1921.

 

Timeline of Art History (2000-Present)

 

Essays

 

•Thomas Sully (1783-1872) and Queen Victoria

 

Timelines

 

•The United States and Canada, 1800-1900 A.D.

 

MetPublications

 

•American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, Painters Born by 1815

•American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 1, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815

•Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting

•The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor

Done