The Blue Feather (1917): Art, History and Details

The Blue Feather (1917) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William J. Edmondson (American, 1868–1966).

The work and its context

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

William J. Edmondson felt that artists should paint what they see, and once declared, "When painting a portrait, I do not indulge in this ‘painting of the soul’ stuff." The sitter in The Blue Feather was his student, Caroline Mytinger, who often modeled for him. Later a portraitist in her own right, she traveled to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands to record its Indigenous people.

Object facts

• Title: The Blue Feather
• Date: 1917
• Creator attribution: William J. Edmondson (American, 1868–1966)
• Culture: America, Ohio, Cleveland
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 107.3 x 112.4 x 5.8 cm (42 1/4 x 44 1/4 x 2 5/16 in.); Unframed: 70.5 x 75.6 cm (27 3/4 x 29 3/4 in.)
• Collection: American - Cleveland School
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1917.400

A detail from the museum

The fashion craze of incorporating feathers in women's hats resulted in the deaths of millions of birds.

Collection credit

Gift of Morris Glauber

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Accessions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 4 (1917): 64-67.
• "Recent Changes in the Painting Galleries." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 5, no. 2/3 (1918): 22-27.

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.