Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)

Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)

Shepard Alonzo Mount

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The simple and sensuous drawing has been linked to the figure of a lightly clad female bather included almost furtively in a corner of the artist’s painting “Landscape and Figures” (1857; Museums at Stony Brook, New York), one of the artist’s small, idyllic interpretations of Long Island scenery. However, both the scale and the pose of the figure relate it more plausibly to the artist’s stock-in-trade: portraits of young women, many of whom Mount represented in the low-cut gowns fashionable in the early Victorian period.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)Back of a Woman (from McGuire Scrapbook)

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.