Apollo and the Muses

In 1919 a stroke left Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston collector and one of Sargent's closest friends, unable to walk. While the dome of the museum's rotunda was still under scaffolding, Sargent arranged a preview for her anyway. Her wheelchair went up in a freight elevator, and she was carried out onto the scaffolding in a bath chair to see the work at close range. This is one of the four large oval canvases set into that dome. Nine Muses in light drapery dance barefoot, hand in hand, round Apollo, who stands on a pedestal with a lyre on his hip and his right hand raised as if directing their steps. The museum's guide of 1922 pointed out two things. The Muses carry none of the emblems that told them apart in antiquity, the mask, the scroll or the globe, and appear simply as a ring of girls in motion. Apollo's hair is gathered in a knot on top of his head like that of the Apollo Belvedere, the celebrated Roman marble in the Vatican, and behind it shines a disc of rays for the sun.