Edwin Austin Abbey: By the Dawn’s Early Light

Until 15 February 2026

From Philadelphia to Gloucestershire, hear the story of a great American artist and his finest painting.

See Edwin Austin Abbey’s huge study for ‘The Hours’, the celestial scene that decorates the ceiling of the House of Representatives Chamber, Pennsylvania State Capitol, Harrisburg. His most important work, created late in his career, was to be his last.

A friend of John Singer Sargent, Royal Academician, successful artist and illustrator – Abbey, born 1852 in Philadelphia, left the US in 1878 for the UK, where he would live for the rest of his life. He produced ‘The Hours’ in his Gloucestershire studio, then the largest art studio in Europe, from where both the study and mural were shipped to the US.

Abbey’s career spanned an age of renewal in America, one of national expression, optimism and ambition that drove new, grand public architectural commissions like the State Capitol building and inspired literature and the arts.

In the painting’s harmonious composition, allegorical female ‘hour’ figures flow in a circle against a starry sky of graduating shades of blue that mark the shift from day to night with the sun and moon at either side.

Sketches and drawings in the exhibition, gifted by his widow to Yale University Art Gallery, show how Abbey devised the rhythmic scheme.

Lead image: Compositional study for ‘The Hours’ mural in the House of Representatives Chamber of the Pennsylvania State Capitol at Harrisburg by Edwin Austin Abbey (detail)
about 1909–11, Image: Courtesy the Yale University Art Gallery