“Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting” by Alexandre Cabanel
“Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting” by Alexandre Cabanel was painted ten years after Olivia Peyton Murray’s (1855-1949) married William Bayard Cutting (1850-1912), a member of New York’s merchant aristocracy. The couple were members of New York’s “Gilded Age,” a period from the 1860s until the early 1900s when wealth was accumulated, concentrated and flaunted as never before in America.
Olivia was an American debutante of the 1870s, confident in her place at the highest level of society. A descendant of landowning ancestors mentioned in the Doomsday Book who owned swaths of Surrey, and whose later descendants owned large tracts of land in Manhattan. In 1877 she married Cutting, and like the Murrays, the Cuttings had been in America since the 18th century and well established. Together they had four children.
Alexandre Cabanel
Alexandre Cabanel was a French painter who painted historical, classical, and religious subjects in the academic style, and he was also well-known as a portrait painter.
Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting
- Title: Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting
- Artist: Alexandre Cabanel
- Year: 1887
- Material: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 276 × 149 cm (108.7 × 58.7 in)
- Museum: Museum of the City of New York
Alexandre Cabanel
- Name: Alexandre Cabanel
- Born: 1823 – Montpellier, France
- Died: 1889 (aged 65) – Paris, France
- Nationality: French
- Movement: Academicism
- Notable works:
- Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting
Explore the Museum of the City of New York
- “Portrait of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton” by Ralph Earl
- “Olivia Peyton Murray Cutting” by Alexandre Cabanel
- “Unveiling The Statue of Liberty” by Edward Moran
A Tour of New York’s Museums
- Metropolitan Museum of Art – MET
- Museum of Modern Art, NYC
- Intrepid, Sea, Air & Space Museum
- Neue Galerie New York
- The Cloisters
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- American Museum of Natural History
- Museum of the City of New York
- New-York Historical Society
- Frick Collection
- Met Breuer
- Rubin Museum of Art
- Whitney Museum of American Art
- Brooklyn Museum
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“Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man.”
– Mark Twain
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Photo Credit: Alexandre Cabanel [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons