At the Threshold

Edith Woodman Burroughs

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The smooth, simplified treatment of this lifesize adolescent female on the verge of womanhood was inspired by Burroughs’s 1909 trip to Paris, where she admired the sculpture of modernist artist Aristide Maillol. The original tinted plaster version of "At the Threshold" was exhibited widely, including at the Berlin Photographic Company in New York, where Burroughs had her first solo exhibition in 1915, just a year before her death. In 1918 it was included in a long-term exhibition of American sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum. The following year the Metropolitan and the sculptor’s widower Bryson Burroughs, then its curator of paintings, arranged to have “At the Threshold” carved in limestone and tinted to resemble the original plaster figure.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art