Mrs. Mary Arthur

Thomas Eakins

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This bust-length portrait depicts the seventy-six-year-old mother of Eakins’s artist-friend Robert Arthur. As a representation of an elderly model absorbed in an old-fashioned task, the work recalls Eakins’s The Writing Master, a portrait of his father, hanging nearby. Here, as in the earlier painting, the artist used strong contrasts of light and dark to define forms and highlight the hands and face, suggesting both manual dexterity and the wisdom of age. Its austere palette and quiet eloquence also reveal Eakins’s study of works by the seventeenth-century masters Rembrandt, Ribera, and Velázquez.

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