Virgil

John La Farge, artist

1835–1910

Virgil, circa 1893

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: paper; watercolor; graphite

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 11.875 x 7 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 302 x 178 mm
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 19 x 14 in

Credit line: William Bridges Thayer Memorial

Accession number: 0000.0168

Not on display

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Civic Leader and Art Collector: Sallie Casey Thayer and an Art Museum for KU

The subject of this design, the Latin poet Virgil, ties the image to the many glass windows that La Farge created for colleges and universities in the American Northeast. Virgil was not only the author of great Roman epics, including the Aeneid, but was also cast by Dante as the poet who leads the narrator through Hell and Purgatory in The Divine Comedy. This monumental literary figure also appears in a window that La Farge designed for Harvard’s Memorial Hall in 1883, where it honored the class of 1880. In this window, Virgil assumes the same pose beneath a canopy suspended from garlands of laurels. The present design, which bears the ghostly inscription “Class of 1890-91,” adapts the artist’s earlier composition. These commissions took part in the same
continuum of university patronage that would inspire Sallie Casey Thayer to donate her immense collection to KU.