The Silver Hand Glass
1907
Medium
Painting
Classification
Painting
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Joan Armstrong Schmidt
Accession Number
1992.4
Tags
About this artwork
In 1891 a group of women protested several of Kenyon Cox's nude studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual show. Cox advocated the nude as an artistic subject but was often criticized because his nudes looked too familiar. For example, in this image the woman gazes into a nineteenth-century silver mirror, wears a fashionable pompadour hairstyle, and sits in a turn-of-the-century domestic interior with contemporary wallpaper. Cox based his treatment of the subject on classical an...
About the Artist
Kenyon Cox · 1856–1919
Kenyon Cox (1856–1919) was born on October 27 in Warren, Ohio, to General Jacob Dolson Cox, a prominent politician and Civil War veteran, and Helen Finney Cox. Despite fragile health, young Cox pursued art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati before advancing to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1877, he traveled to Paris, studying first under Carolus-Duran, then at the Éco...