Ode on Melancholy

Will Hicock Low · 1887

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

60.6 × 45.6 cm (23 7/8 × 18 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

*Ode on Melancholy* is a quietly luminous work that translates the emotional weight of Keats's poem into the language of late nineteenth-century figure painting, with Low rendering a contemplative female figure in the soft, suffused light that defined his mature style. Will Hicock Low trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran alongside a generation of American painters that included John Singer Sargent, and he brought that French academic fluency home with him — an ease with flesh, fabric, and atmospheric tone that set him apart from his contemporaries in New York. His compositions tend toward the meditative and the literary, drawing on classical sources without the stiffness of strict academicism, and this painting is characteristic of that sensibility: graceful, warm, and deliberately unhurried. Low was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote admiringly of his work, and that literary circle clearly nourished the poetic ambition evident in canvases like this one. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed by skilled studio artists working directly from the original, matching the tonal delicacy and brushwork that give Low's painting its distinctive atmosphere — so the quiet melancholy the artist intended reads just as clearly on your wall as it does in the Art Institute of Chicago.