Bring your favorites together in your free personal gallery.
Your galleryDancing Sailors
Look first
- What catches your attention?
- Where does your eye go next?
- What would you ask about this work?
Show me
Follow the mottled blue of the uniforms into the checked floor and the pale arcs behind, where figures and background start to merge.
Demuth drew on his own nights out in Greenwich Village, New York, for this watercolor of three couples. In the middle, two sailors dance with each other, and on either side a sailor holds a woman. He made a nearly identical version, now at the Museum of Modern Art, and kept homoerotic scenes like these private, almost never showing them in public. The Cleveland Museum of Art sees the scene as quiet in its handling but plainly erotic.
watercolor over graphite · Sheet: 20.4 x 25.7 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · American modernism
Look again
What do you notice now?
Try a quick sketch
Take a minute to sketch on any paper. No upload needed.
What did you draw first? What did you leave out?
Details and source
- Museum title
- Dancing Sailors
- Artist
- Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935)
- Date
- 1917
- Medium
- watercolor over graphite
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 20.4 x 25.7 cm (8 1/16 x 10 1/8 in.); Secondary Support: 21.4 x 26.3 cm (8 7/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
- Credit line
- Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.