A Nation of Artists

 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

April 12, 2026–September 5, 2027 

Philadelphia Museum of Art

April 12, 2026–July 5, 2027

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) present A Nation of Artists, a landmark exhibition and collaboration with the private Middleton Family Collection, on view from April 2026 to September 2027.

Organized in conjunction with America’s 250th anniversary, A Nation of Artists examines how artistic production in the United States has been shaped by creativity, exchange, expansion, conflict, and innovation. At PAFA, works made from the late 18th century to today will be arranged thematically to explore scenes of westward expansion, the rise of industry, and international exchange. At PMA, which is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2026, visitors will encounter a chronological display of American art from 1700 to 1960, revealing the global connections that spurred artistic and technological innovation, as well as makers inspired by the natural world, western expansion, and dramatic shifts in economic abundance and disparity.

Installed throughout PAFA’s recently restored Historic Landmark Building and PMA’s newly renovated American art galleries, the exhibition will chart America’s history from 1700 to the present day through more than 1,000 paintings, photographs, sculptures, decorative arts, and more. Across both museums, more than 120 rarely seen works from the Middleton Family Collection—one of the nation’s most significant private holdings of American art—will be on public view for the first time.

Collective highlights from A Nation of Artists:

• Large-scale portraiture and figurative paintings, from Charles Willson Peale’s self-portrait and portrait of George Washington to Thomas Eakins’s famous Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic).
• Lush landscapes and scenes of the natural world by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer, Rookwood Pottery, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
• Explorations of the Civil War period, including a monumental jar made and inscribed by the enslaved potter Dave, who later took the name David Drake.
• Textiles, ceramics, and sculpture by Native American artists from Haida, Hodínöhšö:ni:h (Iroquois Confederacy), Diné, Hopi, and Pueblo nations and contemporary Lenape artist Laura Watters Maynor (Delaware Tribe of Indians, Wolf Clan).
• Impressionist paintings by Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Daniel Garber, and John Singer Sargent, as well as work by modern masters such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.
• Contemporary artists such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Rina Banerjee, María Berrío, Willie Cole, Clarity Haynes, Gisela McDaniel, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Catherine Opie, Stephanie Syjuco, Mickalene Thomas, and Kara Walker, and many more.

Images

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964), Something on the Eight
Ball, 1953-1954, Oil on canvas, 56 × 45 in, Framed:
67 5/8 x 56 1/2 x 3 in, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Purchased with the Adele Haas Turner and Beatrice
Pastorius Turner Memorial Fund, 1954, 1954-30-1

Daniel Garber (1880 - 1958), Tanis, 1915, Oil on
canvas, 60 × 46 1/4 in, Purchased with funds
contributed by Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest, 2011,
2011-60-1

Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Up the Avenue from
Thirty-Fourth Street, 1917 Oil on canvas, 36 in ×
29.93 in, The Middleton Family Collection

Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967), The Lee Shore, 1941,
Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 x 43 in, The Middleton Family
Collection

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 – 1986), Red Hills and Bones,
1941, Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 × 40 in, Philadelphia
Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949,
1949-18-109

Charles Willson Peale (1741 – 1827) Staircase Group
(Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay
Peale I), 1795, Oil on canvas, 7 ft 5 1/2 in × 39 3/8 in,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins
Collection, 1945.

John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), A Siesta, 1904-
1905, Oil on canvas, 22 3/8 × 28 9/16 in, The
Middleton Family Collection

Charles Willson Peale(1741–1827)

GeorgeWashington at Princeton 1779

Oil on canvas961/2×61 1/2 inches (245.1×156.2 cm)

Frame: 1073/8×71 3/4 inches (272.7×182.2 cm)

The Middleton Family Collection

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942), New England Woman,

1895, Oil on canvas, 43 x 24 ½ in, Pennsylvania

Academy of Fine Arts, Joseph E. Temple Fund,

1896.1.

Hugh Henry Breckenridge (1870–1937) ,

Philadelphia, by 1917. Oil on canvas, 37 x 43 in,
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Gift of Mrs.
Hugh H. Breckenridge in memory of the artist,
1938.14.

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), Mother and Sara
Admiring the Baby, c. 1901. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 ×
29 in, The Middleton Family Collection.

Barkley L. Hendricks (1945–2017), J. S. B. III, 1968,
Oil on canvas, 48 x 34 3/8 in, Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richardson
Dilworth, 1969.17.

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Fox Hunt, 1893, Oil on
canvas, 53 x 83 1/4 x 5 in, Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1894.4.

Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Flag, 1960–66. Encaustic and
printed paper collage on paper laid down on canvas,
17 1/2 × 26 3/4 in, The Middleton Family Collection.

Thomas Moran (1837–1926), Mists in the
Yellowstone, 1908. Oil on canvas, 30 × 45 in, The
Middleton Family Collection.

Margaretta Angelica Peale (1795-1882), Strawberries
and Cherries, ca. 1813-1830, Oil on canvas, 10 1/16 x
12 1/8 in, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Source
unknown, 1924.11

Horace Pippin (1888–1946), John Brown Going to His
Hanging, 1942, Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 30 1/4 in,
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, John Lambert
Fund, 1943.11.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Number 4, 1951, Oil,
enamel, aluminum paint on canvas, 30 1/8 × 25 in,
The Middleton Family Collection.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1960). What is an
American?, 2001-03, Lithograph, chine collé,
monotype, ed. 3/4, 68 x 40 in, Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, Gift of Ofelia Garcia,
2015.42.11.

Benjamin West (1738–1820), Death on a Pale Horse,
1817, Oil on canvas, 176 x 301 in, Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, Pennsylvania Academy
purchase, 1836.1.

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) 
An Amethyst Hummingbird with a White Orchid, 
c. 1875-90 Oil on canvas 20 x 12 in. 

The Middleton Family Collection

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) Untitled, c. 1960 
Oil on canvas 95 1/2 x 78 1/2 in. 
The Middleton Family Collection

Everett Shinn (1876–1953) Theatre Scene, c. 1906–07 
Oil on canvas 28 3/4 x 36 in. 
The Middleton Family Collection

Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) 
Scene on the Magdalena, 1854 Oil on canvas 
28 1/4 x 42 in. 

The Middleton Family Collection

Thomas Eakins The Gross Clinic

Thomas Eakins

Date of Birth

(1844-1916)

Date

1875

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

96 x 78 1/2 in. (243.84 x 199.39 cm.)

Accession #

2007.2

Credit Line

Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of more than 3,400 donors

Danial Garber Mending

Frederic Church: Global Artist

Olana State Historic Site 

Opens May 17 

The Olana Partnership has announced  the opening of Frederic Church: Global Artist on Sunday, May 17 at Olana State Historic Site in Hudson, New York. The exhibition commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Church (1826– 1900). 

“We are thrilled to present a landmark exhibition that Ʊrmly places Frederic Church as an artist who sought to bring the beauty and scientiƱc wonder of the world to the United States,” said Sean Sawyer, Washburn and Susan Oberwager President of The Olana Partnership. 

Frederic Edwin Church, Cayambe, 1858. Oil on canvas, 30 × 48 1/8 in. (76.2 × 122.2 cm). The Robert L. Stuart Collection, the gift of his widow Mrs. Mary Stuart. 

Church was celebrated as a preeminent American landscape artist whose life and work was indelibly shaped by global travel that eƯectively brought the world to America. Early trips took him to South America, across the northeastern United States, to Jamaica, and to the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Later he visited Europe and the Middle East, and in his Ʊnal decades he made 15 winter sojourns in Mexico. 

Olana, the designed landscape and home overlooking the Hudson River that he built with his wife Isabel, reflects his global travel and collections. 

Elizabeth Kornhauser, Consulting Senior Curator and Chair of The Church 200 Committee, The Olana Partnership shared, “Frederic Church: Global Artist, brings together a number of Church’s finest monumental oil paintings, and exquisite drawings and oil sketches that are indelibly shaped by his life of global travel. Widely exhibited in the United States and Europe during his lifetime, the artist’s paintings won a new level of respect for American art both in the United States and abroad. Church’s global ambition embodying the central scientific and political dilemmas of his lifetime is explored in the exhibition and accompanying book, providing fresh new insights that redefine this artist for contemporary audiences.” 

Frederic Church: Global Artist examines the artist in his own time and demonstrates his continuing relevance for today’s audiences. Widely exhibited in the United States and Europe during his lifetime, the artist’s paintings won a new level of respect for American art. Frederic Church: Global Artist will unite the broad range of media he mastered, including drawings and oil sketches from Church’s travels with examples of his large, extravagantly detailed paintings produced for public exhibition. Works from the artist’s exceptional collection of photographs will be shown. 

Cotopaxi, Frederic Edwin Church, oil on canvas, 1862, 48 × 85 in. (121.9 × 215.9 cm). Detroit Institute of Arts shot

In addition to rarely seen works from the Olana collection, the exhibition will feature consummate loans from a number of major public and private collections, including the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, The New York Historical, and The Terra Foundation for American Art. 

 Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University, added, “The exhibition Frederic Church: Global Artist reveals the extent of Frederic Church's artistic ambition as a global traveler in the age of empires. It explores his fascination with the natural world, with the hemispheric cultures and histories of the Americas, the Caribbean and the Middle East, and presents Olana as the outcome of his world-wide entanglements. The accompanying book presents lively and original essays by a group of scholars reassessing Church's contribution beyond the local and national, as an artist of global significance.” 

The exhibition is organized by Elizabeth Kornhauser, Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Senior Consulting Curator for The Olana Partnership, Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and Jennifer Raab, Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a groundbreaking new publication from Yale University Press in association with The Olana Partnership, also titled Frederic Church: Global Artist, co-edited by Tim Barringer, Elizabeth Kornhauser, and Jennifer Raab. This lavishly illustrated volume features original essays by scholars from across the humanities that reveal Church as an artist whose works engage with questions of industrialization and environmental destruction, the rise and fall of empires, the construction of national identity, and the cataclysmic eƯects of slavery and civil war. 

Frederic Edwin Church, The Iceberg, c. 1875. Oil on canvas, 22 x 27 in. (55.9 x 68.6 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. 

About Frederic Church 

Frederic Church (1826-1900), is the most famous American landscape artist of the mid19th century. Church’s large-scale and immersive paintings of the natural world captivated a global audience, bringing him critical and Ʊnancial success and international recognition for American art. Church stood apart from his contemporaries by looking beyond European models to seek inspiration in contemporary scientiƱc and environmental thinking. Each painting was an adventure, taking him to South America to paint volcanoes and rain forests, to Labrador and Newfoundland to capture icebergs, and to the Middle East to depict the geology and landmarks of the ancient world. Today, Church’s paintings can be seen in more than 70 public art museums across the United States and in Europe.

Book: Robert Lee Eskridge: Affable Artist, Author, and Adventurer in Tahiti, Hawaii, Brazil, and Beyond

 

Robert Lee Eskridge: Affable Artist, Author, and Adventurer in Tahiti, Hawaii, Brazil, and Beyond

Publisher: South Pacific Dreams Publishing

Release Date: August 11, 2026

ISBN-13: 979-8-9948266-0-7

344 pages and 509 images

In this richly illustrated biography, C. J. Cook reveals the remarkable life of Robert Lee Eskridge—painter, writer, and adventurer whose career spanned five decades and three oceans. Trained in Paris under Cubist master André Lhote, Eskridge carried the bold geometry of modernism into the South Pacific, blending Art Deco structure with the living rhythms of Polynesia.

Four journeys to Tahiti inspired his classic book Manga Reva: The Forgotten Islands (1931), where Art, travel, and firsthand cultural observation come together in vivid prose and illustration. In Hawaiʻi, Eskridge became a visual historian of island life before statehood, painting surfers, fishermen, paniolos, and hula dancers with clarity and respect.

From Tahiti to Hawaiʻi, Brazil, and beyond, Eskridge transformed travel into Art and curiosity into story. This engaging biography restores his place in Pacific art history and invites readers to rediscover an artist who captured the spirit of the islands with insight, adventure, and humanity.

344 pages and 509 images

Long before global tourism reshaped the world’s most remote destinations, artist Robert Lee Eskridge was there — preserving island life as it existed nearly a century ago: the fishermen at daybreak, the surfers poised against rolling seas, the vahine framed by mountain and lagoon.

“His art does more than depict memory; it safeguards it,” writes award-winning author and historian CJ Cook in his book, Robert Lee Eskridge: Affable Artist, Author, and Adventurer in Tahiti, Hawaii, Brazil, and Beyond. “In bringing his life to the page, I have come to understand that his paintings and prose were never separate endeavors. They were twin instruments in a single mission: to make the world more vivid, more human, and more remembered.”

A painter, writer and restless traveler whose career spanned five decades and three oceans, Eskridge produced thousands of watercolors, hundreds of oils and more than 100 illustrations for eight books, three of which he wrote.

Eskridge trained in France under the Cubist master André Lhote, absorbing the structural discipline of modernism and carrying it with him into the tropics. There, he merged Art Deco geometry with the organic rhythms of island life, creating a visual language that was both contemporary and deeply rooted in place. His four journeys to Tahiti culminated in Manga Reva: The Forgotten Islands (1931), a landmark work of Pacific art and literature that blends firsthand ethnographic insight with lyrical prose and evocative illustration.

In Hawai‘i, Eskridge emerged as a keen visual historian of daily life before statehood. His murals, watercolors and oils — depicting surfers, fishermen, paniolos and hula dancers — capture a world in transition with empathy, clarity and respect. Ever curious and unwilling to stand still, he later expanded his palette while traveling through Brazil and Portugal, responding to new cultures with the same attentiveness that defined his island work. At every stage, Eskridge fused scholarship, adventure and humor into his art and writing. His paintings and books reveal a man of intellect and humanity — an artist who bridged continents, honored local cultures and celebrated the enduring beauty of the Pacific and beyond.

“Eskridge urged us to observe with intention and feel sincerely,” Cook writes. “Each painted stroke invited contemplation. Each story bridged worlds.”

AUTHOR

|CJ Cook is an award-winning author and historian whose work focuses on the art, artists and cultural history of the South Pacific. His previous titles, including Tyree: Artist of the South Pacific and Leeteg: Babes, Bars, Beaches, and Black Velvet Art, have earned multiple golds from the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Cook’s biography of Robert Lee Eskridge offers the most comprehensive account yet of the artist's remarkable life and legacy. The expansive, richly illustrated volume features 509 images, including over 210 works by Eskridge.

Cook serves on the board of The Manuscript Society, an organization dedicated to preserving historical documents.

PRAISE

"Robert Lee Eskridge painted Hawai'i at a pivotal moment, when its landscapes and daily rhythms remained intact yet stood on the brink of change. His contemporaries valued his work, and today, a new generation of collectors seeks it out for the way it bridges Hawai'i's past and present."

—Andres Harnisch, harnischandco.com

"For collectors, artists, and those who steward Art across generations, this biography offers more than history. It offers understanding."

—Watters Martin, galleryhawaiiana.com

"Eskridge is a highly regarded artist in Art Deco in Hawai'i and Polynesia. With robust color design and angularity to design forms, his work is outstanding in the art world and collectors' circles."

—Tusha Buntin, tbfas.com

"Eskridge's work is beautiful, unmistakably influenced by Art Deco, and crafted with an honesty that honors Hawai'i, its people, and the spirit of the islands."

—Michael Horikawa, mdhfineart.com

Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction May 19 Part II

 Sotheby’s is honored to present A New Vista: The David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, comprising over 50 works spanning seven decades of passionate, purposeful collecting. Centered on a presentation across two days of Sotheby’s New York Sales this May, the collection carries a combined estimate of $37 - 53 million and brings to market an extraordinary group of paintings, sculptures, works on paper and design that together reflect a deeply personal and lifelong engagement with art. Highlights from the collection will lead off the Modern Evening Auction on May 19'. 

Leading the collection is Alberto Giacometti's La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures), conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960, estimated at $18 - 25 million, and widely regarded as one of the most important multi-figural sculptures of the postwar period. It is joined by the bronze Buste d'homme (New York I), estimated at $2 - 3 million, and an exceptional group of works by Diego Giacometti, whose patinated bronze furniture and objects reflect the Wingates' lifelong conviction that art and design were inseparable pursuits. Further highlights include Mark Rothko's luminous Untitled, circa 1959, estimated at $5 - 7 million and Wassily Kandinsky's Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes), 1930, estimated at $2 - 3 million.

Collection Highlights: 

Alberto Giacometti La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures) 

Conceived in 1950 and cast in 1960 

Est. $18–25 million 

"La Clairière is one of those works that stops you completely. Giacometti arrived at this composition by chance, and yet it feels utterly inevitable — nine figures that seem to hold the weight of everything he would go on to explore for the rest of his career. It is among the most compelling works from this pivotal moment." Allegra Bettini, Head of the Modern Evening Auction, Sotheby's New York. 

One of the centerpieces of the David and Shoshanna Wingate Collection, La Clairière (Composition avec neuf figures) is among the most significant works Alberto Giacometti produced in the postwar period that would define his legacy. Conceived in the spring of 1950, the sculpture belongs to a trio of multifigural compositions — alongside La Forêt and La Place — that marked a turning point in Giacometti’s practice, representing his first sustained success in rendering the elongated, totemic figures that would preoccupy him for the remainder of his career. The work’s origins are as memorable as its appearance. Giacometti had been modeling individual figures separately over the course of several months, each one a study in the elusive challenge of placing a human presence convincingly in space. One day, clearing his worktable, he set the figures on the floor at random and found, in their accidental arrangement, precisely the composition he had been searching for. The resulting grouping of nine women, varied in scale and distributed across a shared rectangular base, evoked for him the memory of a forest glade he had once encountered and longed to paint. 

“To my surprise,” he wrote his dealer Pierre Matisse, “the Composition with Nine Figures seemed to confirm the impression I had the previous autumn at the sight of a glade which attracted me greatly.” That the work prompted a rare moment of unguarded satisfaction from an artist defined by relentless self-questioning makes his words to Matisse all the more striking: “These are the first sculptures which are as I wanted.” 

Cast in bronze by Susse Fondeur in Paris, the present example is one of a small number of casts from the edition, with others residing in the permanent collections of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. 

Alberto Giacometti Buste d'homme (New York I) 

Conceived in 1965 and cast in 1972 

Est. $2–3 million 

Alberto Giacometti made his first sculpture at the age of thirteen, a head modeled after his younger brother Diego. More than fifty years later, it was Diego’s face that occupied him still, in the busts he produced during the final months of his life. Buste d'homme (New York I) belongs to this last, intensely distilled period, when Giacometti was compulsively revising the same forms from the model and form memory, each permutation as urgent as the last. 

The title carries its own history. In 1965, Giacometti made his only visit to the United States, traveling to New York for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Of the works he chose to include from his personal collection, just two appeared on the checklist, handwritten at the end of the printed document: the plaster predecessors of New York I and New York II. They were the only works he selected himself to represent his practice at that precise moment, among the last exhibitions of his lifetime. He died in 1966, months after returning to Europe. The surface of the present bronze registers that urgency directly. Every plane bears the trace of the artist’s hand, every gouge and accretion of bronzes preserving the immediacy of touch. 

Where La Clairière places the human figure in relation to space and to others, Buste d'homme (New York I) distills the encounter to its most irreducible terms: one face, endlessly examined, never resolved. 

Mark Rothko Untitled 

Executed circa 1959 

Est. $5–7 million 

Executed circa 1959, at the height of Rothko's most fully realized decade, this oil on paper mounted on canvas work belongs to a body of paintings that critic Bonnie Clearwater once described as sometimes feeling more quintessentially Rothko than his painted canvases; their intimacy of scale producing a quality of attention that his monumental works approach differently. Its layered fields of jewel tones and amber are applied through the same nuanced feathering technique that defined his large-scale practice, dissolving hard edges into luminous, hovering zones of color that reward close and sustained looking. 

The work sits at a pivotal moment in Rothko's career. In 1958 he had accepted the commission for the Seagram Murals, a body of work that would mark a shift from his saturated, luminous palette toward deeper, more somber tones. This painting captures the transition, its warmth and chromatic richness carrying the resonance of what was already becoming a more searching and interior vision. It was acquired by David Wingate at Sotheby's Parke Bernet in London in 1976, remaining in the collection for fifty years. It was later included in the first exhibition dedicated to Rothko's paintings on paper, the landmark 1984 to 1986 traveling show that originated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and toured major American institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Wassily Kandinsky Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes) 

Executed in 1930 

Est. $2–3 million 

The year 1930 was one of the most consequential of Kandinsky's career. That January, a major retrospective of his work was held at the Staatliches Museum in Saarbrücken, and art historian Will Grohmann published the first serious monograph devoted to the artist, cementing his place in the canon of modernism. It was against this backdrop that Zwei schwarze Streifen (Two Black Stripes) was painted, a work that stands as one of the most luminous expressions of everything Kandinsky had been working toward. 

The canvas belongs to the final, most refined phase of his years at the Bauhaus, the legendary school founded by Walter Gropius around the unifying principles of art, design and their collective social power. Kandinsky had joined the faculty in 1921, and by 1930 was working in Dessau, where the school had relocated under Nazi pressure in 1925. His theoretical treatise Point and Line to Plane, published just a few years earlier, had sought to articulate the intrinsic forces of pictorial elements — shapes, lines, color, pattern — and Zwei schwarze Streifen reads as a luminous demonstration of those ideas in practice. 

In keeping with the Bauhaus spirit of material experimentation, Kandinsky incorporated Ripolin, an enamel paint, alongside traditional oil, the resulting surface playing thin, glossy passages against more matte expanses in a way that rewards close looking. The painting is part of a suite of similarly formatted canvases from 1930, works from which are held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Musée d'arts de Nantes, among others, and has been widely exhibited since its creation across Europe, Japan and New York. 

Varvara Stepanova Two Figures 

Executed in 1921 

Est. $1.2–1.8 million 

Among the most historically significant works in the collection, Two Figures belongs to a series of 38 paintings Varvara Stepanova executed between 1919 and 1921, during a period of intense creative ferment that followed the Russian Revolution. Working at the intersection of art and ideology, Stepanova used this body of work to explore the movement of the human body through an entirely geometric visual language, constructing figures from interlocking angular forms that suggest motion rather than describe it. The series anticipated the design work for which she would become equally celebrated, as the ideas she developed in paint found their natural extension in the geometric textile and fashion designs she produced in the early 1920s. Works from the series were included in the landmark 1921 Moscow exhibition 5x5=25, widely regarded as a pivotal moment in the development of Construcivism, alongside works by Alexander Rodchenko, Stepanova's husband and close collaborator, Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter and Alexander Vesnin. 

The painting's provenance is as remarkable as its art-historical pedigree. Retained by the artist's family for nearly seven decades, it was offered at Sotheby's groundbreaking 1988 auction of Russian Avant-Garde and Contemporary Soviet Art in Moscow, the only international auction ever to have taken place on Soviet soil, where it was acquired by the Wingates. Only one other oil painting by Stepanova has appeared at auction since, when Sotheby's offered Figure with Guitar, no. 3 from the same series in London in June 2014, where it achieved £1,650,500.