A HELLENISTIC MARBLE FIGURE OF A WOMAN, CIRCA 3RD/2ND CENTURY B.C.

reclining with her left leg crossed over the right and holding a fragmentary kithara in her lap, her cloak falling from behind her left shoulder.

reportedly found near Athens
acquired by Joseph Brummer from Aznavorian, rue Le Pelletier, Paris, 1911
Joseph Brummer, New York, 1926 (gift of Mrs. Seymour H. Knox, Sr.)

A.G. Dunbar, The Buffalo Artist's Register, vol. 1, 1926, pp. 55 and 61, illus.
Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Academy Notes, September 1931, p. 30, illus.
Andrew C. Ritchie, ed., Albright Art Gallery. Catalogue of the Paintings and Sculptures in the Permanent Collection, Buffalo, 1949, p. 213, no. 237
Steven A. Nash, ed., Albright-Knox Gallery. Painting and Sculpture from Antiquity to 1942, New York, 1979, p. 74, illus.

In a letter to the Museum dated May 1942 Margarete Bieber suggested that this statue could represent Sappho, who "was regarded as the tenth muse in the later period and therefore, can be represented as a muse. The matronal breast and the half draped appearance, reminiscent of Hellenistic statues of Aphrodite, maye be explained by the fact that her most popular song, the longest preserved for us, is a hymn to Aphrodite... Thus, I believe that it represents Sappho as the Muse of lyric love song, and that it was used as a garden ornament in some modest villa of a cultivated Athenian in the Hellenistic period. Another possibility, suggested by Gisela Richter, is that the figure stood in a pediment."