Currently on View at the Art Institute of Chicago

Charles Courtney Curran

Date: 1888

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.35

Text Entries: Considered Charles Courtney Curran's masterwork, Lotus Lilies depicts Curran's wife Grace Wickham, seated on the left, and her cousin Lottie Taylor. Individual identities are subsumed, however, in favor of an ideal, more universal, notion of femininity, evoked by the pictorial device of flowers and reinforced by the women's demure, downcast gazes. Curran's compositional merging of flora and feminine is seamless and entrancing: the brilliant sunlight bathes an abundance of lilies that frames the women and literally arrests their movement (with no oars in sight). In the distant right, two men can be seen actively rowing through the growth of flowers with no protective umbrella and though Curran has rendered them barely visible the difference is inescapable.