American Art Collaborative

Thomas Wilmer Dewing fancied intellectual, witty women and once wrote that all he ever required of his models was that they have “brains”; his wife, Maria, believed his favorite types of women possessed a “delicacy of form” that amplified their spirituality and intellect. Alma Allen was one such model, and in this portrait Dewing emphasized these traits by focusing on her long neck and pensive expression, rather than the curves of her body or the texture of her dress. (Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Nineteenth-century America, 1996