Laura Wheeler Waring’s Girl in a Green Cap is more than a portrait; it is a meditation on identity, presence, and artistic lineage. As a product of the Harlem Renaissance, it belongs to a lineage of Black art that sought to challenge dominant narratives, asserting beauty and dignity where society sought to erase or distort. The woman in Waring’s painting does not seek validation—her gaze is assured, her posture poised, her presence self-evident. She is not simply a subject; she is a force, a muse.
February, designated as Black History Month, provides an opportunity to foreground not only the historical contributions of Black individuals but also the artistry that has so often been overlooked, dismissed, or outright excluded from mainstream art history. The Harlem Renaissance, the movement to which Waring belonged, was not merely an artistic awakening but a radical cultural shift—a renaissance in the truest sense. It was a reclamation of agency in literature, music, and visual art, a movement that declared the intellectual and creative power of Black Americans to be undeniable and indispensable.
Waring’s work was deeply intertwined with this mission. She painted figures that embodied self-possession and grace, countering dehumanizing depictions of Black life that had pervaded American visual culture. In Girl in a Green Cap, she renders her subject with an almost ethereal softness, but there is no fragility here—only strength. The contrast of the billowing white sleeves against the deep black of her dress draws attention to the balance of light and shadow, of softness and solidity, of historical weight and contemporary elegance. The subject’s green cap, jewelry, and the warm undertones of her skin serve as visual anchors, as if to insist that this woman, this muse, is not ephemeral—she is permanent.
The concept of the muse has long occupied a central role in the history of art. From antiquity, muses were figures of divine inspiration—goddesses who embodied knowledge, literature, and the arts. In the Western tradition, the muse has frequently been reduced to an object of aesthetic admiration, often stripped of autonomy, existing only to reflect the artist’s vision. But the Harlem Renaissance subverted this. Here, the muse was not an object but a collaborator. Black artists turned to their own communities for inspiration, painting their peers, their families, their lovers, and themselves.
Artists like Waring, Aaron Douglas, and Archibald Motley did not seek muses in the European canon but in Harlem’s streets, in jazz clubs, in salons where Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes debated philosophy. The muse of the Harlem Renaissance was both real and symbolic—an embodiment of cultural memory, resilience, and futurity.
Waring’s Girl in a Green Cap belongs to this tradition. The woman in the painting is not a passive figure; she does not exist for the pleasure of an unseen spectator. She meets the viewer’s gaze with a quiet defiance, as if she is aware of her own historical weight. The Harlem Renaissance insisted on this: that Black subjects were not meant to be seen through a colonial or exoticized lens but through the eyes of their own people. In this sense, the painting is both a portrait and an assertion of legacy.
Throughout art history, muses have been imagined as unattainable ideals—women captured in soft light, gazing into the distance, existing only in the margins of the artist’s genius. But when I think of a muse for myself, I do not imagine passivity. I imagine a woman like the one in Waring’s painting.
She is poised but not performative. She does not seek approval because she already possesses an intrinsic, unshakable worth. Her beauty is not conventional but undeniable. She exists in conversation with history, with the artists and poets and dreamers who have sought to capture a fragment of her essence. And yet, she is never fully possessed. The muse, in her truest form, is not a possession—she is a guide, a partner in creation.
There is something profoundly humbling about the idea of a muse—not as a fleeting inspiration but as a presence that shapes artistic thought. To dream of a muse is to dream of a mind that sharpens one’s own, a vision that challenges rather than simply pleases. It is to seek out that which cannot be contained, which lingers in the artist’s consciousness long after the brush has left the canvas.
To study Girl in a Green Cap is to study more than just Waring’s technique; it is to examine the history embedded in its composition. It is to recognize the Harlem Renaissance not only as an artistic movement but as a radical act of self-definition. It is to see the muse not as a passive ideal but as a force—one that speaks across time, across history, across artistic disciplines.
Black history is Black art. And Black art is more than representation; it is reclamation. In this painting, I see both history and future. I see a muse, not just for Waring, but for myself.