Dawn (1912): Art, History and Details

Dawn (1912) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Chester Beach (American, 1881–1956).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Created while Chester Beach was living in Rome, Dawn features a nude man on horseback against a background of human forms emerging from a cloud of rolling mist. Although carved in the round from a block of marble, the sculpture has one primary view.

Object facts

• Title: Dawn
• Date: 1912
• Creator attribution: Chester Beach (American, 1881–1956)
• Culture: America
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 55.3 cm (21 3/4 in.); without base: 35.6 cm (14 in.)
• Collection: American - Sculpture
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1917.630

A detail from the museum

Chester Beach traded two of his sculptures to a farmer in Brewster, NY, obtaining land where he built his studio and a summer home.

Collection credit

Anonymous Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• Solender, Katherine. The American Way in Sculpture, 1890-1930. Cleveland, OH: Published by the Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.
• Barryte, Bernard, and Roberta K. Tarbell. Rodin and America: Influence and Adaptation, 1876-1936. Stanford, CA: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, 2011.
• "Accessions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 4 (1917): 64-67.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.