Thalia

Popular during his era but largely forgotten today, Joseph Fagnani was a leading portraitist of New York's high society in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1869, he created a series of nine portraits of prominent women posed as the Greek muses (74.41-49), which he exhibited to great success in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. According to published contemporary accounts, the portraits were intended to demonstrate the diverse beauty of American Women, appealing to national pride. In a biography of the artist, his wife Emma Fagnani described how he intended to create engravings of the portraits and made precise charcoal drawings after each likeness for this purpose. With its fidelity to the painting ( 74.48) and exacting attention to detail, this drawing of Thalia seems to come from that set.

Originally, the names of the portrait sitters were not revealed, spurring speculation among viewers. By the time the nine portraits were purchased by The Met, in 1874, their identities were well documented. Fagnani had chosen Helen ("Nellie") Smythe to represent Thalia, Muse of comedy and idyllic poetry, identifiable by the Comic mask she holds in her left hand. Born in New York, Smythe was launched into society around 1870, one of three sisters of a prominent family, all of whom were celebrated for their beauty. In 1871, a few years after she was painted by Fagnani, she married William Phillips Jaffray and was listed among "The Four Hundred," a register of New York City’s most prominent society members, compiled in the late nineteenth century by tastemaker Ward McAllister and Caroline Astor—a document that has come to epitomize the extreme wealth and social hierarchies of the Gilded Age.