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  • The Paris Review

    Reading Between the Lines: “Gilded Age Drawings at the Met”

    by Cynthia Payne Dec 06, 2017 4 minutes

    Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson. 1878

    “Gilded Age Drawings at the Met” is a curious attic cleaning of an exhibition. It includes the seldom seen Thomas Eakins 1878 watercolor ,featured on the show’s advertising. The painting is not an obvious choice to exemplify the Gilded Age, and yet, in its reproduction, it is given an importance that is otherwise left unexplained. The exhibition includes a hodgepodge of other work, some of it by lesser lights, and lacks accompanying material about the relationship between art and era. Perhaps more explicit commentary would have run the risk of offending the patron class upon whose riches the Met always has depended.

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