Gloria (1884): Art, History and Details

Gloria (1884) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Wilmer Dewing (American, 1851–1938).

The work and its context

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

Dewing’s small, densely packed composition of four singing angels alludes to depictions of angels playing musical instruments found in 14th-century medieval manuscripts. Angels were traditionally shown playing stringed instruments, whose delicate tones were thought to lift the mind to spiritual matters. The harp, as depicted here, was the instrument most closely associated with heavenly music. With the continuous circling of halos and harps, Dewing suggested a hypnotic, celestial melody.

Object facts

• Title: Gloria
• Date: 1884
• Creator attribution: Thomas Wilmer Dewing (American, 1851–1938)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: gouache over graphite
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30.8 x 27.8 cm (12 1/8 x 10 15/16 in.); Image: 27 x 23 cm (10 5/8 x 9 1/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1956.722

Collection credit

The Fanny Tewksbury King Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the Second Exhibition: Water Colors and Pastels. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• “A Check List. American Paintings and Water Colors of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Centuries in the Cleveland Museum of Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 1 (January 1973): 21–35.
• Hobbs, Susan, and Barbara Dayer Gallati. The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty Reconfigured. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

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.