The Ghost Story (1887): Art, History and Details

The Ghost Story (1887) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Walter MacEwen (American, 1860–1943).

The work and its context

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

During the 1880s, the Netherlands became a magnet for several American artists, among them Walter MacEwen. His most famed painting, The Ghost Story, presents a group of individuals in a Dutch interior listening with rapt attention to spooky narration delivered by a woman at a spinning wheel. A young girl clutches her doll in fascination.

Object facts

• Title: The Ghost Story
• Date: 1887
• Creator attribution: Walter MacEwen (American, 1860–1943)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Unframed: 121 x 191.5 cm (47 5/8 x 75 3/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1923.416

A detail from the museum

The women in this painting wear the traditional clothing of Volendam, a fishing village located in the province of North Holland.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Edward S. Harkness

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wallraf-Richartz-Gesellschaft in Köln, and Wallraf-Richartz-Museum--Fondation Corboud. Es War Einmal in Amerika : 300 Jahre US-Amerikanische Kunst. Edited by Barbara Schaefer and Anita Hachmann. Köln: Wienand Verlag : Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, 2018.
• "The Ghost Story by Walter McEwen." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 10, no. 7 (July, 1923): 123-130.
• Boller, Susanne. "The Munich Men - Amerikanische Maler der Munchner Schule." In Es war einmal in Amerika: 300 Jahre US-Amerikanische Kunst. Barbara Schaefer and Anita Hachmann. Köln: Wienand Verlag : Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, 2018.

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.