c. 1890

Young Woman in White by the Sea

American, 1852 - 1911

The image of youth and beauty, dressed in white and fresh as the flowers tucked in her sash, this young woman embodies the dainty ideal of femininity of about 1890. Her style of dress evokes the earlier Romantic period as well as the classicizing mode of the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement. Famous as an illustrator and a muralist, the Philadelphia-born Abbey excelled at such idealized and allegorical figures from literature and history. He worked with John Singer Sargent and Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the decorations of the Boston Public Library, and with Violet Oakley to paint murals for the Pennsylvania state capitol in Harrisburg.