Artist:
Peter Paone
(b. 1936)
Second Commandment: No images nor idols make for Robert Ingersoll to break
Medium: Etching and aquatint on paper
Date: 1963
Dimensions:
30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm.)
Accession number: 2023.13.33
Curatorial RemarksAn idol is an image of a deity to be worshipped. Peter Paone (b. 1936) creates a terrifying, multiheaded creature whose talons support slender legs and whose claw-like fingers hold a flowering branch. Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), named in Bierce’s second commandment, was a lawyer, writer, politician, and orator. Though Ingersoll contentiously campaigned, unsuccessfully, for political office as an agnostic (which Bierce defended), he became highly influential in the Republican party of the late nineteenth century.
Completed in 1963, The Ten Commandments of Ambrose Bierce garnered Paone a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1965, allowing him to study in London and Paris. The Brandywine’s exhibition, “In Shadows’ Embrace: Prints by Peter Paone” (2024) is the first time in 57 years that the portfolio is being shown in full, the last being at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.
Completed in 1963, The Ten Commandments of Ambrose Bierce garnered Paone a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1965, allowing him to study in London and Paris. The Brandywine’s exhibition, “In Shadows’ Embrace: Prints by Peter Paone” (2024) is the first time in 57 years that the portfolio is being shown in full, the last being at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.
On view