Detail of Meg Merrilies by Thaxter in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, January 2018

Meg Merrilies

Edward R. Thaxter (American, 1857–1881)

about 1881

Object Place: Florence, Italy

Medium/Technique: Marble

Dimensions Overall: 66.68 x 46.99 x 38.74 cm (26 1/4 x 18 1/2 x 15 1/4 in.)
Mount (1/2" S.S. steel rod / dry mounted onto steel plate Nagoya): 1.4 x 30.5 x 25.4 cm (9/16 x 12 x 10 in.)

Credit Line: William E. Nickerson Fund

Accession Number: 63.5

Collections: Americas

Classifications: Sculpture

Meg Merrilies is the ugly, half-mad gypsy in Sir Walter Scott's novel "Guy Mannering" (1815). Like West's "King Lear," exhibited nearby, the sculpture speaks to the wild and fearsome aspects of life-the exact opposite of the calm, classicism often represented in art. Thaxter, originally from Maine, worked in Florence. He drew upon a variety of visual sources, from Hellenistic Roman images of haggard market women to the dramatic marbles of the great Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Provenance: 1963, The Crown Studio, through John Cunningham, New York (accesseion date January 9, 1963).


Text from: collections.mfa.org/objects/39416/meg-merrilies