Polyhymnia

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 (74.45) and exacting attention to detail, this drawing of Polyhmnia seems to come from that set.



This delicate charcoal portrait represents Bostonian Ellen Shaw Barlow (Mrs. Francis Channing Barlow) (1845-1936) as the Muse of Heroic Hymn, Polyhymnia. Draped in carefully rendered classical garments, attributes of Polyhymnia are prominent in the composition: she holds a scroll in her right hand and a lyre rests against her left leg.



In 1866, Ellen Shaw married Francis Channing Barlow, a lawyer who became an important Union General during the United States Civil War. Barlow is the subject of Winslow Homer’s painting Prisoners from the Front (22.207) in The Met collection.