Gift of the Misses Harriet Sarah and Mary Sophia Walker
Copyright
Public Domain
Accession Number
1893.36
The Museum’s central rotunda is a magisterial space decorated below the dome by four large semicircular murals by the four leading painters of the American Renaissance: Elihu Vedder, Kenyon Cox, Abbott Thayer and John LaFarge. They were commissioned by McKim who believed in the unity of the arts and constituted an extremely important ensemble of architectural decoration. The original mural scheme called for each artist to paint an allegorical representation of one of the four cities perceived at the time as most central to the development of western art. In his painting of Florence, Thayer employed his favorite device, an angelic female figure, to represent the guardian spirit of Art.
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