Interior Study
This conversation is connected to Interior Study.
Edwin Austin Abbey was an American illustrator and painter who moved to England in 1878 and never came back. He's best known for Shakespearean subjects and the Holy Grail murals at the Boston Public Library, but he was also a gifted watercolorist — elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours in 1883. Interior Study is a quieter piece of work. A wooden staircase with a turned newel post rises through a hallway, painted in fast, transparent washes of gray-blue, brown, and green. A window at the end of the hall lets in a square of daylight. Abbey trained as an illustrator at Harper's before he ever picked up oil paint, and you can feel that draftsman's eye here — the composition is all structure and light, observed quickly and accurately.