American Art Collaborative

A Bostonian by birth, Thomas Wilmer Dewing launched his career in New York in the early 1880s and attracted a coterie of collectors with his dreamlike representations of female figures in interiors or landscapes. The Song is inspired by the artist’s wife, Maria Oakey Dewing, and her friend Annie Lazarus (sister of the poet Emma Lazarus), a wealthy aesthete who was romantically involved with Dewing in the 1890s. Set in the lush garden of his summer home in Cornish, New Hampshire, the painting depicts the contrast between performance and contemplation, a favorite theme of Dewing’s. If tensions in the artist’s marriage and love life provided the initial inspiration for The Song, they are almost entirely subsumed into a synesthetic evocation of musical pleasure.