The Bather

Edmund Austin Stewardson

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Philadelphia native Stewardson considered "The Bather," his first and only life-size figure, a study in form. The realistic seated nude, free of symbolic content, elegantly arranges her hair. At the Paris Salon of 1890, Stewardson was awarded an honorable mention for his plaster model. After he drowned in a sailing accident off Newport, Rhode Island, in 1892, his father arranged for the sculpture to be translated to marble in Paris by the French sculptor Agathon Léonard. In 1895, perhaps at the suggestion of his son’s former teacher Thomas Eakins, the senior Stewardson also had a bronze made from the plaster cast. Both this bronze and a plaster sketch of the work attributed to Stewardson are in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

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