Sitting

Sitting is a subject in art. The gallery holds 200 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, Thomas Eakins and Paolo Veronese.

Sitting is among the oldest and most charged of human postures in art, and from the earliest civilizations it carried meaning far beyond simple rest. In ancient Egypt the seated pose signified permanence, status and command: the limestone Seated Scribe of Saqqara (c. 2620–2325 BCE, now in the Louvre), cross-legged with a papyrus across his knees and rock-crystal eyes, embodies attentive authority, while the diorite Khafre Enthroned projects total royal and divine power. To sit—especially to sit upon a throne—was visually to occupy a position above and apart from those who stood or knelt in attendance.

Medieval and Renaissance art codified this language of the seated figure into sacred formulas. The Maiestas Domini, or Christ in Majesty, shows Christ enthroned and frontal as ruler of the cosmos, while the Italian Maestà presents the enthroned Madonna and Child, the Virgin's rigid form echoing her chair so that she becomes the "Throne of Wisdom" for her son. Giotto's monumental Ognissanti Maestà (c. 1310, Uffizi) is a defining example. In parallel, Asian art developed lalitasana, the relaxed "royal ease" with one leg pendant, for kings and bodhisattvas alike.

The rise of secular portraiture made the seated pose a flexible instrument of character and rank. A sitter at rest could read as dignified, contemplative or intimately aristocratic, and artists labored over the precise attitude. Jacques-Louis David's reclining Madame Récamier (1800), Ingres's brooding Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832), and Whistler's austere Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1—Whistler's Mother (1871, Musée d'Orsay)—show how a chair, a profile and a pair of folded hands could carry an entire personality.

Nineteenth-century realism turned the seated figure toward everyday life and quiet observation. Thomas Eakins's The Chess Players (1876, Metropolitan Museum) sets two absorbed opponents and a watching father in a Philadelphia parlor, while Degas repeatedly studied dancers resting between exertions, as in The Dancing Class. The motif threads through earlier mythologies too—the seated Venus of Titian's Venus with a Mirror and Veronese's Venus and Mars—confirming sitting as one of art's most enduring and adaptable poses, equally suited to gods, monarchs and ordinary people at ease.