American in London: Edwin Austin Abbey
Edwin Austin Abbey, 1852-1911
Installation View. Compositional study for The Hours mural in the House of Representatives Chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol at Harrisburg, about 1909-1911 Oil on canvas, 381 x 381 cm
Photo by Irina Sheynfeld
Last weekend I missed my air travel connection from Geneva to New York and ended up stranded in London with my two sons, Michael and Eli. We had spent a week skiing in Méribel with friends, and although the mountains were beautiful and Savoyard food bountiful, at times I felt I had been stuck in the sticks for too long. So, to my great surprise, a short and unplanned stay in London felt more like a vacation than the vacation itself.
As it wasn’t our first time in the capital of the British Empire, we revisited places we already knew and were surprised to find interesting things everywhere: a hat shop, a pen and paper store, and an elegant small exhibition at the National Gallery — Edwin Austin Abbey: By the Dawn’s Early Light.
To my shame, I was only vaguely familiar with Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911). He was born in Philadelphia but he lived and worked for most of his life in England where he moved in 1878. Yet Abbey continued to work on commissions for American institutions, including the Boston Public Library on Copley Square and the new State Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the United States, this period in art and architecture was known as the American Renaissance (1876–1917), and it emerged as part of the nation’s rebuilding effort following the devastation of the Civil War.
By the Dawn’s Early Light is part of the larger exhibition The Dance of Light, organized by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2024, and it focuses on works Abbey created for the State Capitol’s House of Representatives in Pennsylvania. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large round study for the mural The Hours. It was created in the artist’s Gloucestershire studio shortly before his death in 1911. Both the study and the mural were shipped to the United States, and the mural was installed posthumously.
The mural depicts twenty-four female figures, each representing an hour, caught in various stages of dance, prance, gallop, and gliding. They move along the edge of a cobalt circle that represents a single day. On one side, there is a golden sundial and a sky of a lighter shade of blue. On the opposite side, a silver moon shines from behind the hooded hours of the night. At three o’clock, the hour-maidens begin to wake up and cast off their dark robes of night. The first fully nude woman greets the sun with her arms outstretched in celebration of the new day. Her lively sisters, dressed in diaphanous blue, turquoise, pink, and purple dresses, dance the dance of life and joy along the edge of the circle of hours until they reach nine o’clock. There a cloak of the night appears again, darkening the hours and turning them into black silhouettes against the silver circle of the moon.
American artists of this period were deeply inspired by Italian Renaissance themes, such as the allegorical hours of the day, and perhaps Abbey was thinking of Michelangelo’s sculptures Day, Night, Dawn, and Dusk (or Twilight) in the Medici Chapel in Florence. Abbey’s figures, like Michelangelo’s, represent the passage of time — its inevitable progression from birth to radiant frolic in the sun, and then into a quick decline into darkness, invisibility, immobility, and nothingness. The dark figures gliding by the moon almost disappear into the background only to be return as young maidens just a few hours later.
Even though Abbey worked centuries after Michelangelo and his projects did not involve religious subjects, on the contrary his murals were created for civic buildings in the United States. The golden stars that dot the deep blue heights of his heavens evoke the Renaissance cathedrals of Italy and France. They form constellations, and there is even a floating cloud of the Milky Way galaxy and the gold evokes immortality and otherworldliness of the early renaissance skies.