TitleYoung woman seated in grass
Artist
Kenyon Cox
(American, 1856 - 1919)
Date1879
MediumOil on composition board
DimensionsUnframed: 7 3/4 × 10 in.
Storage: 8 1/4 × 12 1/4 × 1 1/4 in.
SignedSigned across top: "To Miss Hart - Grez - Aug. 11 - 1879 - Kenyon Cox"
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of Allyn Cox, Caroline Cox Lansing, and Leonard Cox, 1959
Object number1616.11-P
Label TextCox spent most of the summer of 1879 in Grez-sur-Loing, a small town some 43 miles south of Paris, on the southern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, which he had first visited the year before. Many Americans, as well as artists from other countries, worked there. While in Grez he created several loosely painted out-of-doors sketches of the figure in oil, including those of a Miss Hart and a Miss Adams, with whom he was apparently romantically involved at the time. During most of 1879, Cox was studying with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. Typically, art students would have an opportunity to paint only during their summers off from school. Encouraged by his efforts in Grez he wrote his family in early July of 1879 that he was "beginning to hope that my apprenticeship proper may be shorter than I had expected at one time."Some of the outdoor figure sketches that Cox executed in Grez in the summer of 1879 may have been utilized in the completion of his now unlocated painting Dans les herbes, which was exhibited at the 1880 Paris Salon. Before heading back to art school in Paris in the early autumn, Cox remarked that he had "not done as much work as I expected . . . but shall have three or four pictures and some studies to show for it."
