Meg Merrilies is the ugly, half-mad gypsy in Sir Walter Scott's novel "Guy Mannering" (1815). Like West's "King Lear," exhibited nearby, the sculpture speaks to the wild and fearsome aspects of life-the exact opposite of the calm, classicism often represented in art. Thaxter, originally from Maine, worked in Florence. He drew upon a variety of visual sources, from Hellenistic Roman images of haggard market women to the dramatic marbles of the great Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

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