Two Ladies

Winslow Homer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

During the late 1870s Homer, the celebrated painter and illustrator of the American Civil War, occasionally portrayed fashionably dressed women and shepherdesses inspired by eighteenth-century Rococo porcelain and paintings. In 1880 he executed several watercolors of elegant young women seen singly or in pairs, as in this sheet. Such ingratiating glimpses of frivolous feminine pastimes would give way to more dour accounts of working women’s lives in views of Cullercoats and Tynemouth on England’s North Sea coast, where Homer worked in 1881–82.

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