Edith B. Murphy (American, b. around 1888, active 1930s)
La Grange, Illinois, United States
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
INV-2018
Edith B. Murphy (American, b. around 1888, active 1930s)
La Grange, Illinois, United States1930
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
Edith B. Murphy (American, b. around 1888, active 1930s) La Grange, Illinois, United States →Modernismweavingtextile
Date
1930
Medium
Cotton and silk, weft-float-faced twill weave; fulled; indigo discharge dyeing
Dimensions
110.9 × 94.6 cm (43 5/8 × 37 1/4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Cynthia Lee Jenner in honor of her mother, Nadine Newbill Jenner
This fantastical hanging envisions elements of writer Eugene Field’s poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” in which three sailors set sail in a wooden shoe “on a river of crystal light, / Into a sea of dew.” They cast their “nets of silver and gold” into the “twinkling foam” to catch herring fish while the “old moon laughed and sang.” Here, artist Edith Murphy emphasized the twinkling sensibility of the poem through the angled motifs that border the moonlit sea and suggest stars arching through the night sky and reflecting on the water’s surface.
Murphy made this work for her student and friend Nadine Newbill Jenner. As a small child, Jenner had a difficult time pronouncing her name, which came out as “Noddie,” and her father subsequently nicknamed her “Nod.”
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