Symphony in Green and Gold

 
 
 
 

Symphony in Green and Gold

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dc.contributor.author Dewing, Thomas Wilmer en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2008-04-14T19:03:20Z
dc.date.available 2008-04-14T19:03:20Z
dc.date.created 1900 en_US
dc.date.issued 2008-04-14T19:03:20Z
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/2374.OX/20
dc.description No Description en_US
dc.format.extent 36 x 48 in. en_US
dc.format.medium Oil en_US
dc.publisher Akron, Ohio en_US
dc.source 1955.25 en_US
dc.title Symphony in Green and Gold en_US
dc.type Painting en_US
dc.coverage.nationality United States en_US
dc.format.technique Oil on Panel en_US
dc.repository.name Akron Art Museum en_US
dc.contributor.institution Akron Art Museum en_US
dc.permissions World en_US
dc.description.notes Symphony in Green and Gold belongs to a group of landscape "decorations" that Thomas Dewing painted during his summers at the renowned artists' colony of Cornish, New Hampshire. Dewing valued these outdoor themes because they were less easily understood th\|an his interiors, and because they appealed to those "choice spirits," as he termed them, who were his most discerning clientele.1 When Akron art collector Edwin Shaw purchased this painting, Dewing wrote him, "the Green and Gold that you bought . . . is a\|s fine as anything of my decorations."2 The lush Cornish terrain, reached after a day's journey by train from New York City, offered its inhabitants a respite from the city where they spent most of the year painting. In Cornish, Dewing and his friends cre\|ated an environment for themselves inspired by the art of the past. They built Italianate villas with vine-draped porches and planted formal gardens, which they furnished with high-backed, semicircular wooden benches reminiscent of ancient Greek and Roman \|seating. Dewing introduced gardening and elegant dinner parties. He also staged theatricals with Greek and Roman themes similar to the one he depicted here. While the Cornish colonists enjoyed dressing up in "greek costume," as Dewing put it, they also may\| have found another source of inspiration in third-century tanagra figures.3 Discovered during the 1870s in archeological digs near Athens, these tiny statuettes with their elegant drapery and dainty poses captured the imagination of many artists. Symphon\|y in Green and Gold is related to a series of screens that Dewing executed in Cornish. The wooded environment surrounding the chiton-clad figures in the first of these, The Four Sylvan Sounds, was inspired by that of the art colony. A subsequent commission\|, Classical Figures, depicts this landscape as a mere billowing mist. The jewel-toned background in Symphony is even more abstracted, its emerald curtain of color referring, perhaps, to the ravines that punctuated the Cornish terrain. As i en_US

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  • Akron Art Museum
    Images from the Akron Art Museum includes works by Stieglitz, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Weegee.

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