Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley

Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, Self Portrait (1897)

The artist I am featuring today is the American painter and watercolourist Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley.  She was born on July 13th 1860 in the small coastal town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Her father, Peter Radcliffe Hawley was an officer in the coast guard and her mother, Isabella Hawley (née Merritt), a Canadian-born dancer. Wilhelmina’s ancestors were English and Scottish migrants, who moved to the east coast of the United States and Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth century

Birthplace of Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley, Merritt Peck House, 213 High Street, Perth Amboy, New Jersey

Wilhelmina had three siblings: an older sister Jeanne and two younger brothers William and Alan Ramsey.  When Wilhelmina was four-years-old, the family moved to the New York suburb of St Albans, a residential neighbourhood in the southeastern portion of the New York City borough of Queens. Wilhelmina developed two loves during her pre-teen years.  One was a love of sketching and painting thanks to two of her unmarried aunts, Florence and Georgina Agnes Merritt and the other was the love of travel once her grandparents took her to Europe when she was just twelve years of age and it was the excitement of visiting so many new places that encouraged her to start writing a journal.

The Cooper Union

Wilhelmina soon developed a love of art and decided to follow the dream of becoming a professional painter.  In 1879, at the age of nineteen, she enrolled in the Cooper Union Women’s Art School, one of the New York art academies that is open to women.  The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was established in 1859 and is among the nation’s oldest and most distinguished institutions of higher education. The college, founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist, Peter Cooper, offers a world-class education in art, architecture and engineering as well as an outstanding faculty of humanities and social sciences.  Cooper took the revolutionary step of opening the school to women as well as men. There was no colour bar at Cooper Union. Cooper demanded only a willingness to learn and a commitment to excellence, and in this he manifestly succeeded.

Two Women near the River Waal by Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley (1894)

Wilhelmina remained at the Cooper Union for a year and then enrolled at the Art Students League where she honed her artistic skills eventually becoming the first woman vice-president of this progressive institution. Her tutors included William Merritt Chase, Julian Alden Weir, Charles Yardley Turner and Kenyon Cox. The popularity of the Art Student League was that it was based in New York and the city attracted many European artists, many of whom Wilhelmina met while living and studying at the Arts League.

Young Woman in the Meadow by Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley

To escape the cold climate of New York, Wilhelmina spent the winter of 1891/2 on the island of Bermuda where she fell in and out of love with a mysterious Englishman whom she had agreed to marry.  Fortunately, she realised the error of her judgement and the two split up.  Once again, like so many American artists of the time, who succumbed to the magnetism of Paris, Wilhelmina was drawn towards the French capital to continue with her artistic tuition. On June 18th 1892, just a month before her thirty-second birthday, Wilhelmina once more, set sail for Europe on the Holland-America steamer Veendam.  During her Atlantic voyage, Wilhelmina was accompanied by the Dutch-American artist John Vanderpoel and his wife Jessie Elizabeth Humphreys. Vanderpoel. He was a well-known artist and taught at the Art Institute of Chicago where one of his tudents was Georgia O’Keeffe, and it was he who most likely suggested to Wilhelmina that she should spend the summer months at the charming village of Rijsoord near Dordrecht in the Netherlands, where he had founded an artists’ colony in 1886. 

Interior with Mother, two Children and Cat by Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley

On arriving in Paris Wilhelmina registered at the Académie Julian, one of only two art academies in the city to which women and foreign students were admitted.  Having arrived in the Summer, all the Academies were closed for the summer break and would not re-open until the September.  Wilhelmina used the time to travel throughout Belgium and the Netherlands and on 4 July 1892 she made her first visit to the Dutch flax village and artists’ colony at Rijsoord, where various foreign artists and art students had been living and working since 1888 especially during the summer months.  In 1893, Wilhelmina achieved her first artistic successes at the French Academy where she was awarded a prize for best composition.  Also for the first time, one of Wilhelmina’s paintings was selected for the Paris Salon that year, and success came from across the Atlantic when her painting, Holland Peasant Girl was shown in New York at an exhibition of the National Academy of Design

Girl Knitting in a Field by Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley

In 1893, Wilhelmina was appointed as an art teacher at Academy Colarossi and it was around this time that she met English-born Canadian art student, Laura Muntz  A friendship between the two women sprung up and Laura moved in with Wilhelmina at her studio at No. 111 Rue Notre-Dame-des -Champs. Close to the Palais de Luxembourg.  Directly across from their studio was the studio of American artist, James Abbott McNeill Whistler.  Both Laura and Wilhelmina were regular visitor to Whistler’s studio, and he to theirs.

Laura Muntz Lyall. 

Laura Munz, who was born in 1860 in Radford, Warwickshire, England, was the same age as Wilhelmina and is recognised as one of the most talented painters of her time.  She was an impressionist painter, best known for her depiction of mothers and children. When she was a small child, she emigrated with her family to Canada, where grew up on a farm in the Muskoka District of Ontario. 

A Daffodil by Laura Munz Lyall (1910)

In 1882, Laura began to take classes at the Ontario School of Art in Toronto.   She also studied briefly at the South Kensington School of Art in 1887, then returned to Canada to continue her studies at the Ontario School. She came to Paris in 1891 and before she met Wilhelmina had been living alone and earning money by teaching and administrative work.  She was the first Canadian to receive the distinguished “Honourable Mention” at the Paris Salon exhibition in 1895.

Portrait of Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley by Laura Munz (1897)

In 1896 Laura returned to Canada for a short spell to help look after an ailing relative.  She returned to Paris and the Academy Colarossi and was promoted to the post of  massiere (Studio head) at the Académie Colarossi.  In 1898 she returned to Canada in 1898 and set up a studio in Toronto to teach and paint.  In 1906, she moved to Montreal to continue her career and built up a large clientele that regarded her as the premier Canadian portraitist of children.  Following the death of her sister in 1915, she returned to Toronto and married her brother-in-law Charles W.B. Lyall and cared for his children of her sister’s marriage, eleven in all, but many had left home by then.  She set up a studio in the attic of their home, and started signing her works with her married name. Laura Munz Lyall died in Toronto in 1930, aged 70.

Rose by Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley (1895)

Wilhelmina and Laura spent part of the summers in the French countryside as well as the artists’ colony of Rijsoord in the southern Netherlands. She would often take her international students of the Académie Colarossi with her on these painting trips.   It was here that Wilhelmina captured the villagers in oils and watercolours. The village of Rijsoord was well situated for passing travellers on the Rijksstraatweg (State Highway), an important European road that connected Paris to The Hague.

The bridge over the River Waal at Rijsoord, with Hotel Warendorp on the right

An inn was constructed on the spot near the river Waal where the eighteenth-century tollhouse had stood. The building is still standing and for several years had housed the restaurant Hermitage. When Wilhelmina first visited Rijsoord, the inn was called Hotel Warendorp. Hotel Warendorp functioned as the headquarters of the summer academy. The ground floor of the building comprised a livingroom, diningroom and a room for drinking coffee. Most of the guestrooms were also on the ground floor. On the floor above it, the large space under the roof was used as an artists studio, where the artists would hang their most recent paintings and watercolors for discussion. On rainy days, when it was impossible to work en plein air, the artists would actually work in the studio. Wilhelmina’s great granddaughter, Alexandra van Dongen, wrote about how her great grandmother met her husband in her blog: For Two Years, or Perhaps Forever”; Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley and the Artists’ Colony in Rijsoord.  The tale is an instalment in a monthly series of blogs telling stories about the rich history shared by the American and the Dutch peoples.  She wrote:

“…In 1899, Wilhelmina apparently first encountered the 31-year-old Rijsoord farmer Bastiaan de Koning (1868-1954). They most likely met during a boat trip on the river Waal, as the story goes, as local villagers including De Koning, regularly rowed the artists to their outdoor painting locations. In the summer of 1900 Wilhelmina returned to Rijsoord again and announced her engagement to Bastiaan. They married a year later on December 5, 1901. Another three years later, when Wilhelmina was 44 years old, she gave birth to a daughter, my grandmother, Georgina Florence de Koning (1904-1973), named after Wilhelmina’s aunts. By that time, Wilhelmina had been active in the art world for twenty-five years. Family life did not prevent her from traveling abroad, visit exhibitions or meet her friends in Paris and New York. In 1915, her family in Rijsoord engaged a young housekeeper, Geertrui van Nielen (1895-1981), who became an important supporter in her life. Trui, or Troy, as she was called by Wilhelmina, took care of household matters and looked after Georgy, as Wilhelmina’s daughter was called, when her mother was traveling abroad …”

Wilhelmina continued to live with her husband and daughter in Rijsoord.  Years later she enjoyed the summer holiday visits from her daughter, Georgy, her husband, Hans van Dongen and their six children.  On February 18th, 1958, Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley passed away at home at the age of 97.

The information I used for this blog came from a number of excellent websites, all of which are worth visiting. They are:

The Society of the Hawley Family

For Two Years, or Perhaps Forever”; Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley and the Artists’ Colony in Rijsoord

Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley

Schildersdorp Rijsoord 1886-1914

New York Almanack

Finally, may I wish you all a Merry Christmas and hope that peace may return to us all.

John White Alexander

During the nineteenth century, Paris was considered the art capital of the world.  Once the American Civil War had ended, aspiring American artists, who had the necessary funds, made their way across the Atlantic to the French capital and enrolled in one of the many ateliers there, to learn from the foremost painters of the time.  Many enrolled in the prestigious government-sponsored École des Beaux-Arts and in thriving private academies and studios.  They also had the chance to visit the Louvre and study the works of the Masters of byegone days and be impressed by the modern works on display at the Paris Salons, World’s Fairs, and other exhibitions, including the eight shows staged by the Impressionists.  These young Americans also submitted their own works to the various exhibitions.  Today I am looking at the life of one such American, John White Alexander.

The American photographer and art critic, John Nilson Laurvik, wrote about my featured artist in the December 1909 edition of the Metropolitan Magazine:

“…In the whole history of art one looks in vain for anything approaching his inimitable skill in the arrangement and play of his figures. . . .[He is] pre-eminent as a delineator of feminine beauty and charm…”

John White Alexander

John White Alexander was an illustrator, landscape and still life painter, printmaker, muralist, society portraitist,  and production designer of posters, costumes, scenes, lighting, and tableaux vivants.  Alexander was born on October 7th, 1856, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, which is now a part of the city of Pittsburgh.  He was orphaned at the age of five and was subsequently raised by his grandparents. When Alexander was 12 years old, he quit school and became a telegraph boy. One of his employers, Colonel Edward Jay Allen, the secretary/treasurer of the Pacific & Atlantic Telegraph Co., noticed Alexander’s aptitude for drawing and began working with him to help him develop that talent. So impressed with Alexander that he assumed guardianship of the young boy and persuaded him to return to the local High School for eighteen months.

Six years later, in December 1874, Alexander and a friend took a trip down the Ohio River,  earning money for food by sketching farmhouses and selling them to the locals.  It is said that Mark Twain read about their trip and a number of incidents on their voyage of exploration were used in his 1884 novel,  Huckleberry Finn.  Soon after his adventure, Alexander relocated to New York and spent three months seeking a job in New York City, visiting a number of publishers, showing his sketchbook.  He was finally employed as an office boy at Harper’s Weekly magazine where he was later promoted to illustrator and political cartoonist in 1875. He remained working for the magazine for three years. 

Alexander then travelled to Paris but found it very expensive and moved on to Germany and the city of Munich where he received his first formal artistic training at the Royal Academy, winning a bronze medal for drawing.    It was in Munich that Alexander first met Kentucky-born German painter, Frank Duveneck.  In 1878, Duveneck had opened a painting school in Munich.

Portrait of John White Alexander by Frank Davenek (1879)

However, like Paris, the cost of living in the city of Munich proved too onerous for Alexander and so he and Duveneck moved to the Bavarian town of Polling, a small town fifty miles east of Munich, where Duvenek set up another painting school and Alexander taught a private watercolour class in Duveneck’s school.  His students were known as the Duveneck Boys and included such aspiring painters as John Twachtman, Otto Henry Bacher, and Julius Rolshoven.  In 1879 Duvenek completed a portrait of John White Alexander.

Venice Canal Scene by John White Alexander (1880)

From 1879 to 1881, Alexander travelled and studied with Frank Duveneck in Italy. The pair spent the summer of 1880 in Venice.    One day, Alexander met Whistler by chance as he was painting next to a canal. Alexander returned to America in 1881 and was able to pick up illustrative commissions from various magazines.  One such commission saw him travelling 2,100 miles along the Ohio River in the Spring of 1881 resulting in sixteen sketches of the local coal industry.

Oliver Wendell Holmes by John White Alexander

On his return to America besides returning to his work as an illustrator, he became a very successful portrait artist. Many well-known individuals sat for Alexander such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American physician, poet, and humourist notable for his medical research and teaching, and as the author of the “Breakfast-Table” series of essays.

…..also Thomas Worthington Whittredge, an American artist of the Hudson River School.

Walt Whitman by John White Alexander (1889)

….and Walter Whitman Jr. who was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American history.

Mary Emma Woolley by John White Alexander

In 1909, Alexander completed the portrait of Mary Emma Woolley, an American educator, peace activist and women’s suffrage supporter. She was the first female student to attend Brown University and served as the 10th President of Mount Holyoke College from 1900 to 1937.  It is a beautiful portrait of the woman, exuding elegance and his brushstrokes along with the delicate shadows depict her as a dignified woman of great importance.  The sitter lightly thumbs a book with one hand while the other is clenched into a fist which was possibly referencing her knowledge and passion.  It is said that the way Alexander portrays Woolley validates a tendency among male artists of this era, who often painted women as domestic, inwardly emotional beings with exquisite exterior refinement.

Owing to the fact that they both had the same surname, John White Alexander was introduced to and later married, Elizabeth Alexander.  She was the daughter of James Waddell Alexander, president of the Equitable Life Assurance Society.   John and Elizabeth had one child, the mathematician James Waddell Alexander II.  In 1881 John White Alexander completed a black and white sketch of Elizabeth.

Portrait of Mrs John White Alexander (1902) by John White Alexander

……….and in 1902 he completed a full-length portrait of his wife.

Azalea (Portrait of Helen Abbe Howson) by John White Alexander (1885)

A turning point in Alexander’s artistic career came when, during a summer European holiday in 1884, he wrote to his early mentor, Colonel Allen, telling him of his desire to complete a “subject picture”. The result was his 1885 painting entitled Azalea (Portrait of Helen Abbe Howson). In Alexander’s painting, we see Howson adorned in a white dress seated on a sofa on the left of the horizontally elongated painting.  To counteract that, on the right is a white-flowering azalea branch in a large celadon vase and on the back wall one can see the bottom of a framed image.  The main title of the painting refers to the flowers Helen Howson stares pensively across the room at.  This pose of Howson is one of contemplation and in many of his figurative works Alexander depicts women who avoid the gaze of the viewer.  Some believe that Alexander’s depiction of self-conscious subdued women may be his way of counteracting the growing activism of women in their battle for suffrage and other forms of equality that was manifesting around this time.

Whistler’s Mother by James Mcneil Whistler

Historians believe the depiction was influenced by Whistler’s portrait of his mother which had been exhibited in New York in 1882.  The poses are similar. The “cut-off” picture frame is depicted in both paintings.

Six years later in 1897 Alexander completed another memorable work featuring a single woman.  It was entitled Isabella and the Pot of Basil and is based on a poem written by the English poet John Keats entitled Isabella, or the Pot of Basil. Keats had actually “borrowed” his tale from the Italian Renaissance poet Giovanni Boccaccio.  The story goes that Isabella was a Florentine merchant’s beautiful daughter whose ambitious brothers disapproved of her romance with the handsome but humbly born Lorenzo, their father’s business manager. The brothers murdered Lorenzo and told their sister that he had travelled abroad. The distraught Isabella began to decline, wasting away from grief and sadness. She saw the crime in a dream and then went to find her lover’s body in the forest. Taking Lorenzo’s head, she bathed it with her tears and finally hid it in a pot in which she planted sweet basil, a plant which is now associated with lovers. 

This scene was made famous by William Holman Hunt’s 1868 version…

 …….and the 1907 one by John Waterhouse,

However Alexander’s pictorial rendition of the scene is so different to the other two.  His depiction has used theatrical effects to depict this gruesome scene.  He has isolated Isabella in a shallow recess and illuminated her from below, almost as if she were an actor on a stage who has been illuminated solely by the footlights.

There is an eeriness about the way Alexander has utilised a cold monochromatic palette, and if we allow are eyes to follow the sensuous curves of Isabella’s gown, they are finally drawn to the loving attention Isabella gives the pot, as she gently caresses it. Isabella seems to be in a world of her own totally oblivious to us, the viewers.  It is a tragic depiction of lost love.

Panel for Music Room, by John White Alexander (1894)

There has always been a connection between fine art paintings and music.  So many famous works of art have depicted people playing musical instruments.  It is the conjoining of two great arts.  Many such paintings depict young ladies playing a musical instrument or intently listening to a musical recital.  Take a look at this beautiful work by John White Alexander as he depicts two young women laying back languorously on a long and plush sofa. 

Look carefully at their facial expressions.  The woman on the left who is playing the guitar is lost in concentration and in some ways seems mesmerised by the sounds coming from her instrument.  The woman on the right lies towards her resting on an ornate cushion.  She seems to be in a dream-like state lost in thought.  It is a frieze-like horizontally elongated depiction which measures 94 x 198cms (33 x 78 inches) portraying a dream-like atmosphere.

Memories by John White Alexander (1903)

Another of Alexander’s paintings featuring the interaction between two women is his 1903 work entitled Memories.

Repose by John White Alexander (1895)

One of Alexander’s most famous works is his 1895 painting entitled Repose. Once again it is a depiction of a woman lying languourously across a large cushion on a long sofa. The curves of her body can be seen despite the voluminous white dress she wears. Her head rests on her hand and she looks out at the viewer. 

The facial expression of the woman, whose lips are slightly parted, gives an added touch of sensuousness to the depiction. This provocative facial expression along with the sinuous curves are a reflection of the then current French taste for sensual images of women as well as the undulant linear rhythms of Art Nouveau.

Murals by John White Alexander on the Grand Staircase of the Art Museum of the Carnegie

Alexander held his first exhibition in the Paris Salon in 1893 and it was held to be a brilliant success.  Immediately following the exhibition, he was elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts.  In 1901 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and in 1902 he became a member of the National Academy of Design. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1900 at the Paris Exhibition he was awarded a gold medal.  Another gold medal was awarded to him in 1904 at the World’s Fair at St. Louis. His works are in museums in both America and Europe.

Grand staircase, Art Museum of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh

In addition, in the entrance hall to the Art Museum of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, a series of Alexander’s murals entitled Apotheosis of Pittsburgh covers the walls of the three-storey atrium area.

View overlooking Grand Staircase of the murals by John White Alexander

At the top of the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Art Museum in Pittsburgh, a cultural haven sponsored by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, there is a sweeping mural completed by John White Alexander in 1907.  This total number of murals cover almost 4,000 square feet of wall space of the interior.  The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh is a series of forty-eight murals, all painted by Alexander between 1905 and 1915.  The murals reflect turn of the century Western ideals of progress across three floors of the Grand Staircase. Alexander was given creative freedom for the project, and the resulting murals tell a story of Pittsburgh through the lens of Andrew Carnegie’s vision of the steel industry and the wealth gained through Industrial Capitalism that fuelled his philanthropy. Alexander completed the first elements of the mural in 1907 and the remainder in 1908.

Jonathan Scorch’s blog has a full description of the murals.

John White Alexander died May 31st 1915, aged 58, before finishing the mural panels for the third floor.

Laura Wheeler Waring. Part 2.

Houses at Semur by Laura Wheeler Waring (1925)

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port by Laura Wheeler Waring (1925)

After her short stay in the south of France, Waring returned to Paris in the Spring of 1925 and continued her studies at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére whilst staying in the Villa de Villiers in Neuilly-sur-Seine.  That year Laura completed her paintings, Houses at Semur, France and Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Critics believed this was a turning point in her artistic style as we see her use of vivid colours in order to express vivid, brilliant atmospheric conditions. Both works enhanced her growing reputation.  The following year, she had works shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And her standing in the art world was such that she was asked to curate the Negro Art section at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia.  

On June 23rd, 1927, Laura Wheeler was married to the Philadelphian, Walter Waring, a public-school teacher, who was ten years her junior and who was then working as a professor at the all-Black Lincoln University. The couple had no children. That same year, Laura won a gold medal in the annual Harmon Foundation Salon in New York. Laura Waring was actively painting during the Harlem Renaissance.  The Harlem Renaissance was an influential movement in African American literary, artistic, and cultural history from 1918 to the mid-to-late 1930s. The movement was originally referred to as the New Negro Movement, which referred to Alain LeRoy Locke’s 1925 book, The New Negro, which was an anthology that sought to motivate an African-American culture based in pride and self-dependence.

She was also involved with the Harmon Foundation.  It was established in 1921 by wealthy real-estate developer and philanthropist William E. Harmon who was a native of the Midwest, and whose father was an officer in the 10th Cavalry Regiment.  The Foundation originally supported a number of good causes but is best known for having served as a large-scale patron of African-American art and by so doing, helped gain recognition for African-American artists who otherwise would have remained largely unknown.

In 1944 the Harmon Foundation, which was under the direction of Mary Beattie Brady, organized an exhibition Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin.  The idea behind the exhibition was to try and counteract racial intolerance, ignorance and bigotry by illustrating the accomplishments of contemporary African Americans. The exhibition featured forty-two oil paintings of leaders in the fields of civil rights, law, education, medicine, the arts, and the military. Betsy Graves Reyneau, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Robert Savon Pious painted the portraits that became known as the Harmon Collection. US Vice President Henry A. Wallace presented the first portrait, which featured scientist George Washington Carver, to the Smithsonian in 1944. The Harmon Foundation donated most of this collection to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 1967.

Anna Washington Derry by Laura Wheeler Waring (1927)

Laura Wheeler Waring will always be remembered for her portraiture and her most acclaimed work was not of the prosperous and famous African Americans which I have highlighted below but of a poor laundress, Anna Washington Derry.  She was one of five children who had moved with her family from Maryland to the eastern Pennsylvanian town of Strodsburgh, a borough in Monroe County.  Monroe was home to a small free Black community who had arrived via the Underground Railroad, a network of secret routes and safe houses used by enslaved African Americans to escape into free states.

The beautiful realistic depiction of the old lady beautifully conveys the lady’s dignity and inner determination through her use of simple, brown-beige tones of her dress, her expressive face, her folded arms and hands.  In the town where she lived Derry was looked upon as that of a community matriarch who was fondly addressed locally as “Annie”. The portrait was unveiled in 1926 at an elite exhibition for Black Philadelphian professionals some of whom may not have identified with Waring’s “ordinary” subject. The art historian Amanda Lampel commented:

“…Although Derry’s portrait did not sell that day, the Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest continuously published African American newspaper in the United States, called it remarkable……… Compared to fellow contemporaries like Aaron Douglas, Waring was much more conservative in her painting style and subject matter. This was in keeping with the types of artists who won the prestigious Harmon Foundation award, which sought to spotlight the up-and-coming Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Most of the award winners painted more like Waring and less like Douglas…”

In 1927 Laura exhibited the portrait of Anna Washington Derry at New York’s Harmon Foundation where it received the First Award in Fine Art – Harmon Awards for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes. From there it was exhibited at Les Galeries du Luxembourg in Paris and across America.  The depiction was often reproduced in magazines and journals. The exhibition had its premiere at the Smithsonian Institution on May 2nd, 1944.  For the next ten years, Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin, exhibition, travelled to museums, historical societies, municipal auditoriums, and community centres around the United States.  The public response was overwhelmingly positive in every venue.

James Weldon Johnson by Laura Wheeler Waring

Laura Wheeler Waring will be most remembered for her portraits of successful, upper class Negroes and whites including James Weldon Johnson, the successful Broadway lyricist, poet, novelist, diplomat, and a key figure in the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.  In 1900, he collaborated with his brother to produce “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song that later acquired the subtitle of “The Negro National Anthem.”

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois by Laura Wheeler Waring

Another sitter for Laura was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (W.E.B. DuBois), who was the first African-American to earn a doctorate from Harvard University  He then became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University, and  co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), and founder and editor of the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis. Laura Waring had worked for Du Bois, creating several illustrations for The Crisis. Laura depicts Du Bois seated at a wooden desk or table, looking to the right. The spectacles he holds in his right hand, and the small paper he holds in his left, confirm his status as an intellectual and academic.

Marian Anderson by Laura Wheeler Waing (1947)

Many women were sitters for Laura’s portraits including Mary White Ovington, an American suffragist, journalist, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).  Another of her most famous female portraits was of  the opera singer, Marian Anderson.  This contralto singer, like many African American artists of the time, first achieved success in Europe. She was persuaded to return to America in 1935 and that year had a triumphant concert which secured her standing in the opera world.  In 1939 she became embroiled in a historic event when the Daughters of the American Revolution banned her appearance at its Constitution Hall because she was black. President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, stepped into this controversial banning and arranged for her to take top billing at the Easter Sunday outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial, an event which drew in 75,000 opera fans as well as having the event broadcast to a radio audience of millions.

Jessie Redmon Fauset by Laura Wheeler Waring (1945)

Another female to have her portrait painted by Laura Wheeler Waring was Jessie Redmon Fauset, the first African American woman to be accepted into the chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Cornell University, where she graduated with honours in 1905. Fauset then taught high school at M Street High School (now Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., until 1919  She then moved to New York City to serve as the literary editor of the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis. In that role, she worked alongside W. E. B. Du Bois to help usher in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson by Laura Wheeler Waring (1927)

In the 1890s women formed national women’s club federations, most of which were dominated by upper-middle-class, educated, northern women. Few of these organizations were bi-racial, a legacy of the sometimes uneasy mid-nineteenth-century relationship between socially active African Americans and white women. Rising American prejudice led many white female activists to ban inclusion of their African American sisters. The black women’s club movement rose in answer in the late nineteenth century. The segregation of black women into distinct clubs produced vibrant organizations that promised racial uplift and civil rights for all blacks, as well as equal rights for women. Soon there followed another, more powerful group known as the National Association of Coloured Women in 1896. Women, including Laura Wheeler Waring and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, came together from a variety of backgrounds to combat negative stereotypes and fight for basic rights. Alice Dunbar-Nelson became the subject of Laura Wheeler Waring’s 1927 portrait. By the time the portrait was completed, Dunbar-Nelson was a prominent political activist and journalist and was much in demand as a public speaker. The depiction of her radiates her self-confidence and both artist and sitter were talented, intellectual women whose friendship helped advance the rights of both women and African Americans.

Waring died on February 3rd, 1948, aged 60, in her Philadelphia home after a long illness.  She was buried at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania. In 1949, Howard University Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. held an exhibition of art in her honour.  Her paintings were also included in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at Philadelphia’s Woodmere Art Museum.

Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948)

There is no doubt that although Laura spent most of her life in America she always treasured her three stays in France which played an important role in her artistic progress. During those three periods on French soil she was able to engage in its culture, and associated with famous French, African, and African American intellectuals. Her scholarship, her study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, and her solo exhibition in Paris gave her recognition in the United States in the form of awards, supervisory and teaching positions, and additional exhibitions.  Like many of her colleagues, Waring cherished the freedom she found abroad, declaring in her diary:

“…In my very busy seasons here to come I shall want to relive some of these moments of atmosphere. I record them so that I can never say “I wish I had enjoyed that more” or “I didn’t apprecate all that then but now—[.]” I can never say the above truthfully because am grateful every minute and even the least of things gives me a thrill. . . . The very feeling of freedom is a pleasure and the ride on the bus down will be a joy…”

Much of the information for this blog and many of my other blogs in the past has come from an excellent website entitled The Art Story.

Other sources were:

A CONSTANT STIMULUS AND INSPIRATION”: LAURA WHEELER WARING IN PARIS IN THE 1910s and 1920s by Theresa Lieninger-Miller

BLACKPAST

SPEEDWELL

Laura Wheeler Waring. Part 1.

The art critic Patricia Tilton commented on the artist I am featuring today, Laura Wheeler Waring, writing:

Waring is the perfect role model for little girls who have big dreams. Determined and committed to pursuing her passion, young Laura began to manifest her dreams. She was self-confident, believed in her gift, and welcomed each opportunity that came her way.

Laura Wheeler, later Laura Wheeler Waring, was born in Hartford Connecticut on My 26th 1887.  She was the fourth of six children. 

Her father was Reverend Robert Foster Wheeler, who was the pastor of the first all-Black church in Connecticut, the Talcott Street Faith Congregational Church. It had been built in 1819 as a place for African Americans to worship on their own since they were previously only able to worship in the backs of churches and in church galleries in that city.  Her mother was Mary Wheeler (née Freeman), who was a teacher and amateur artist. Laura’s maternal grandparents were Amos Noë Freeman, who was a Presbyterian minister, and her maternal grandmother, Christiana Williams Freeman, was an anti-slavery activist who worked as part of the Underground Railroad which was the given name to a secret network of escape routes and safe houses run by abolitionists in Portland, Maine, and Brooklyn, New York. Laura’s family were well educated.  Her father studied Theology and graduated from Howard University in 1877 and her mother graduated from Oberlin College.

Still life with Heather by Laura Wheeler Waring (1927)

Laura’s parents were determined that their children should learn about African history and were attendees at the local bible classes.  The family would also make regular visits to Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as well as other local art events. The children soon developed a love of art and would frequently sit around their dining room table to sketch and paint together. The American art critic Patricia Campbell Carlson wrote about young Laura:

“…[Waring] would even bribe her brothers and sisters with peppermints to get them to pose for her. And although she knew there were no portraits of African Americans in museums yet, she hung her paintings in her room as a ten-year-old so that her sisters and brothers could see pictures of people with all different shades of brown staring back at them,,,”.

After Sunday Services by Laura Wheeler Waring

Laura Wheeler Waring attended Arsenal Grade School and Hartford High School and was a model student who graduated from Hartford with honours. Whilst at the High School she showed an interest in art and the school fostered this love of hers, encouraging her enthusiasm for drawing and painting with watercolours.  She graduated from Hartford High School in 1906 with honours.

Institute for Colored Youth Building Historical Marker

In the Autumn of 1907, Laura, now a twenty-year-old, through the auspices of her father was offered and accepted a position at the Institute for Coloured Youth, an African Institute, a trade school that taught young Black people necessary skills to retain employment and later became a training institution for teachers. In 1902, the Institute moved to George Cheyney’s farm, 25 miles west of Philadelphia, and afterward the name “Cheyney” became associated with the school and became known as the Cheyney Training School for Teachers. Nowadays and since 1983 it has become the Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.

Girl in Green Cap by Laura Wheeler Waring

Times were difficult financially for Laura who was paid just seven dollars a month although room and board were provided. She needed money to pay the train fare to Philadelphia where she attended drawing classes, still life painting, portraiture, and illustration at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.   She remained there for the next six years.  The person who influenced Laura the most at the Academy was Henry Bainbridge McCarter, an American illustrator and painter known for his influence on the modernistic art movements. McCarter had worked as an illustrator in New York before becoming an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for forty years.  He managed to encourage Waring to take on board and appreciate Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

Girl in Red Dress by Laura Wheeler Waring

In 1914, Laura graduated from the Academy, and she was awarded the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts prize was a two-year scholarship for foreign travel awarded annually to their art students.   This award for artistic excellence, which began in 1902, was funded by Emlen and Priscilla Cresson in memory of their son William Emlen Cresson, an Academy alumnus, who died in 1868 at the age of 23. He had been a child prodigy painter who began exhibiting at the Academy at a very young age. The award allowed recipients to study art at the Louvre.  Laura was the first Black woman to receive the award,

A Rural Landscape by Laura Wheeler Waring

Whilst in Paris Laura studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and travelled throughout Great Britain. During her stay in the French capital, she spent much time in the Louvre Museum studying the works of Monet, Manet, Corot, and Cézanne. In Theresa Leninger-Millerher article:  A constant stimulus and inspiration”: Laura Wheeler Waring in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, she quotes Laura as saying:

“…I thought again and again how little of the beauty of really great pictures is revealed in the reproductions which we see and how freely and with what ease the great masters paint…”

Still Life with Fruits by Laura Wheeler Waring

Laura Wheeler Waring had originally planned to travel more around Europe visiting Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, but her trip was cut short when war was declared in Europe and she had to return to America.

Four Friends by Laura Wheeler Waring

Back in America, Waring returned to teaching at Cheyney, and she played an important role in setting up the school’s new art and music departments. For thirty years she acted as the department’s art director and Chair, and between 1921 and 1934 she conducted the Cheyney Choir, training her students in high-toned spirituals and classical music. The Cheyney College like the local church, the Thornbury African Methodist Episcopal Church, slowly became the community centre for the black residents of Cheyney. Laura took her choir to sing at the church.  It was through her involvement with the church that she first met Annie Washington Derry, who would later become the subject of her most famous portrait which she completed in 1927 and which is owned by the Smithsonian is American Art Collection in Washington DC.

Landscape with River by Laura Wheeler Waring

Laura took a year out from teaching between 1924 and 1925 and returned to Paris.  This time she was accompanied by African-American novelist and poet, Jessie Redmond Fauset. On her arrival at the French capital she enrolled for classes in Expressionism and the Romanticism which were run by French artist and designer Bernard Boutet de Monvel, and the American painter Robert Henri. In October 1924 she enrolled to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére, where she studied painting and it was here that she began her life-long love of portraiture.

Once More we Exchange Adieu by Laura Waring (1925)

In January 1925, Laura Waring travelled to the South of France where she spent four days in the coastal town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. While living there she began to create illustrations for short travel stories and completed a number of figurative pen and ink drawings for The Crisis magazine. One of these was her pen and ink drawing entitled Once More We Exchange Adieu.  It depicts an African American woman dressed in a modern collared long sleeve dress, with black pumps holding a briefcase and waving goodbye to a white woman and child dressed in winter attire.

Houses at Semur by Laura Waring (1925)

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port by Laura Waring (1925)

In the next blog I will be looking at Laura Wheeler Waring’s portraiture, a genre which she is most famous for.

……………………………………………………to be continued.

Ethel Spowers

The Tate website defines linocut thus:

“…The lino block consists of a thin layer of linoleum (a canvas backing coated with a preparation of solidified linseed oil) usually mounted on wood. The soft linoleum can be cut away more easily than a wood-block and in any direction (as it has no grain) to produce a raised surface that can be inked and printed. Its slightly textured surface accepts ink evenly.  Linoleum was invented in the nineteenth century as a floor covering. It became popular with artists and amateurs for printmaking in the twentieth century…”

It is thought to have been first displayed in the first decade of the twentieth century and its popularity has grown ever since.  The artist I am showcasing today is a twentieth century Australian artist who made her name as a skilled exponent of this artistic technique.  Let me introduce you to Ethel Louise Spowers, a painter and printmaker.

Ethel Louise Spowers was born on July 11th 1890 at South Yarra, Melbourne.  She was the second born of six children of New Zealand-born newspaper proprietor, William George Lucas Spowers and his London-born wife Annie Christina, née Westgarth.  She had four sisters, Frances, Cecilia, Rosalind and Myra and a younger brother, Allan.  Ethel was brought up in a wealthy and cultured household in a mansion in St Georges Road in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak.

The Kite by Ethel Spowers (1918) Watercolour

Ethel was enrolled at the private Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar which she matriculated from in 1908.  Having completed her schooling, she went with the family on a trip to Europe and Ethel attended an art school in Paris.  This introduction to world of art, together with the encouragement from her mother and grandfather, both of who were amateur artists, and who inspired her. In 1911, she enrolled on a six year course in drawing and painting at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne, where she became known for her black and white children’s story illustrations.  As a student she was allowed to exhibit annually at the National Gallery of Victoria, and also having become a member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria she began to regularly exhibit in their exhibitions. In 1918, selected members of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria were invited to exhibit with the Arts and Crafts Society of New South Wales and it was here that Ethel sold her first work.  It was a pen and ink and watercolour painting entitled The Kite.  The National Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney purchased it.

School is Out by Ethel Spowers (1936)

In 1920 Spowers held her first solo exhibition at the Decorations Gallery in Melbourne.  The exhibition comprised of fifty-four of her works which included black and white drawings, watercolours and two oils, many of which depicted fairy-tale and nursery rhyme themes. In 1921, Ethel Spowers provided the illustrations for Furnley Maurice’s novel Arrows of Longing

The Pigeon Loft by Ethel Spowers (1925)

That same year, the Spowers once again travelled to Europe, this time for an extended stay.  During this European voyage of discovery Ethel continued with her artistic studies.  Whilst in London she attended the Regent Street Polytechnic, and she and fellow Australian, Mary Reynolds, exhibited their work at the Macrae Gallery.  Buoyed with the success of the exhibition Ethel decided to prolong her stay in Europe whilst her parents and siblings went back to Australia.

The Blind by Ethel Spowers (1926)

During her European stay, she also went to Paris, where she enrolled at Academié Ranson.  Later, in 1923, whilst in Paris, her friend, Eveline Syme, from back home came to see her. Spowers and Syme were childhood friends who came from rival media families who ran competing newspapers, The Argus and The Age.   Eveline Syme and Ethel Spowers both attended life drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.  In 1924, after three years of living in Europe, Ethel returned home to Melbourne and had her work exhibited at the Victorian Artists’ Society as well as having a solo exhibition at the New Gallery in Melbourne in 1925 and 1927. It was around this time that Ethel Spowers became interested in Japanese woodblock printing, The prints are made by carving an image on a wooden block, applying ink or paint, and pressing it on paper or fabric.  She began to experiment with this art form.

The Plough by Ethel Spowers (1928) Lino-cut

Claude Flight was one of the leading artists to experiment with and make popular the linoleum cutting and printing technique. He initially studied art at the Heatherley School of Fine Art from 1913-1914 and exhibited at the Royal Academy, Paris , the Royal Society of British Artists. and the Redfern.  He taught at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art from 1926.

Ethel Spowers first became aware of Claude Flight’s ideas through her good friend, Eveline Syme, who in 1928 had bought a copy of Flight’s groundbreaking book Lino‑cuts. A hand‑book of linoleum‑cut colour printing, which was published in 1927. Spowers and Syme were captivated with this new form of art.   Ethel Spowers was familiar with woodcut printing but she wanted to learn more, and so, a few months later, she and her friend had enrolled on a course run by Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Art, London.

The Enchanted Brds by Ethel Spowers (1927) Watercolour

Claude Flight educated them in the art of colour printing without a linear key block and were inspired by his encouragement to encapsulate the speed and movement of contemporary urban life simply, by simplified form, bold colour and rhythmic patterns. Eveline and Ethel learnt quickly and absorbed all Flight had to tell them and quickly developed their own distinctive new styles and subject matter. 

Speed, a lino-cut by Claude Flight

Whereas, at the time, Flight was interested in depicting the modern age through transport and industry, Ethel Spowers preferred to depict scenes of children and family life including picnics, urban street scenes and children at play.  Her bold and simplistic works oozed vibrancy.

Melbourne from the River by Ethel Spowers (c.1924)

Once back in Australia, Ethel Spowers set about promoting the lino-cut medium as she fervently believed that it was a modern medium for a modern age, and she and Syme, along with Dorrit Black staged a group exhibition of their lino-cut works at the Everyman’s Lending Library in Melbourne in 1930.  Ethel also demonstrated the technique at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition, held in Melbourne, in October 1935.

The Rain Cloud by Ethel Spowers (1931)

The London art scene took notice of Spowers’ work and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the British Museum, bought works of hers in 1930.  The following year Ethel Spowers returned to London and once again enrolled at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art to study with Claude Flight. While in Australia, Spowers continued to promote this modernist art style through the media and lectures.  She became a founding member of Contemporary Group in Melbourne and acted as an agent for Claude Flight and his circle in Australia. Ethel Spowers was a leading light of this group and was continually having to defend this modernist art style against its more traditionalist disparagers.  In an article in the Australasian in April 1930 she pleaded with all lovers of art to be tolerant to new ideas and not to condemn without understanding. She also gained a teaching post at the Swinburne Technical College, Melbourne in the mid-1930s.

Resting Models by Ethel Spowers (c.1934)

In the late 1930s Ethel Spowers stopped practicing art after being diagnosed with breast cancer.  Her health steadily deteriorated and she died on May 5th 1947 after a long illness.  She was aged 56 and was buried at Fawkner Memorial Park in northwestern Melbourne.

Ethel Sands and Anna (Nan) Hope Hudson

The blog today is about two talented early twentieth century painters who became lifelong friends and companions despite them having different ideas as to what was a “perfect” life.  Ethel Sands preferred the life of a socialite and enjoyed lavish soirees and was reputed to be one of the most important hostesses in cultured English society in the early twentieth century. However, Nan (Anna Hope) Hudson was more introverted, and craved a quiet rural lifestyle in her beloved France and Sands and Hudson apportioned their time between England and France to accommodate their lifestyle preferences . The art historian Wendy Baron described them as:

“…two independent, individual women with many tastes and interests in common, whose mutual love and understanding rescued them from the loneliness of spinsterhood…”

Ethel Sands (c.1927)

Ethel Sands was born on July 6th 1873 in Newport, Rhode Island.  She was the first-born child of Mary Morton Hartpence and Mahlon Day Sands who married in 1872. It was Mahlon’s second wife.  His first wife Edith Mintum died of typhus in 1868 whilst on a sea voyage.  Mahlon Sands was secretary of the American Free Trade League, as well as being a partner of his deceased father’s pharmaceutical importing firm, A.B. Sands and Company.   Mary and Mahlon also had two young sons, Mahlon Alanson Sands and Morton Harcourt Sands, who were five and eleven years younger respectively than their sister Ethel.  The three children were brought up in a well-to-do upper-class family household.

Still Life with a View over a Cemetery by Ethel Sands (1923)

When Ethel was eleven-years-old the family left America for what was supposed to be a short trip to England but, once there, decided to base themselves in London which they thought was a good base for onward travelling to the European countries.  However, they kept their house in Rhode Island and would return there once every year

Tea with Sickert by Ethel Sands (1912)

Mary and Mahlon moved amongst the wealthy London society, such as the Rothschild family and politicians, such as Gladstone, the writer Henry James and the artist John Singer Sargent.  They were also part of Edward VII, the Prince of Wales’ “Malborough House” social circle. 

Mrs Mahlon Day Sands by John Singer Sargent (1894)

Ethel’s mother Mary was considered to be a famous Society beauty of the day who had her portrait painted by Sargent and Henry James based his heroic character “Madame de Mauves” on her in his novella which centred on the troubled marriage of a scrupulous American wife and a far from scrupulous French husband.  Ethel Sands inherited a taste for socialising from her American parents.

Nan Hudson playing Patience at Chateau d’Auppegarde

Ethel Sands’ happy family life came to a shuddering halt when she was thirteen for in May 1888, her father, whilst out riding through Hyde Park, was thrown from his horse and died, aged 46.  Ethel’s mother was now tasked with bringing up the family on her own.

Nan Hudson c.1908

John Singer Sargent had encouraged Ethel to concentrate on her art and she took his advice for in 1894 when she was twenty-one, she decided to go to spend time in Paris to study painting.  Ethel began her artistic education at the Académie Carrière in Paris. Her early paintings featured highly coloured still-life works and interior depictions. Sands first exhibited her work in an exhibition held at the Salon d’Automne, Paris in 1904.  It was in 1894, whilst an art student that she met her lifelong partner Anna (Nan) Hope Hudson.

The Lamb Inn, Wallingford by Nan Hudson (1912)

Anna Hudson, best known as Nan Hudson, was born on September 10th 1869 in New York City. Her father was Colonel Edward McKenny Hudson, who died in 1892 at the age of sixty-seven; her mother had died in 1878 when Nan was just 9 years old. Having lost both parents, twenty-three year old Nan was left a large inheritance which was the result of her grandfather’s success as a partner of a banknote engraving organization, which later merged to become the American Bank Note Company.  Now, a young woman of independent means, was able to choose her own future. She had developed a love of painting and decided to follow this love and decided that Paris offered the best opportunity to further her artistic knowledge.  In the early days of living in the French capital she met Ethel Sands, a fellow American and art student who became her lifelong friend and companion.

Nan and Ethel studied together in 1896 at the studio of the French painter Eugène Carrière and then from January 1897 Nan also took classes with the Flemish painter Henri Evenepoel.  The friendship between Ethel and Nan, which started as study friends, soon blossomed and before long, they became inseparable.  This closeness is somewhat astonishing as the two women had totally different personalities.  While Ethel Sands found life in London, with all its social distractions, irresistible, Nan Hudson preferred the quieter existence in Paris and the French countryside.  However, they managed to compromise, dividing their time between France and England to satisfy both their yearnings, alternating periods of painting with travelling, socialising and entertaining.

Miss Hudson at Rowlandson House by Walter Sickert (c.1910)

The writer Virginia Woolf, in her diaries, described Nan Hudson as being dour and upstanding who was always stylishly dressed while the artist Walter Sickert, in a letter to the pair, described Nan as being the radiant and dashing horsewoman of a young man’s dreams.  In 1910 Walter Sickert completed a portrait of Nan Hudson, standing hand on hip and looking directly at the viewer, and captures her independent spirit and flair.  The painting was given the title Miss Hudson at Rowlandson House.

Portrait of Ethel Sands by Walter Sickert (1914)

After Nan and Ethel had made a trip to Venice, Nan completed a painting entitled Giudecca Canal and she had it exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1906.  It was liked by the critics and greatly admired by Walter Sickert. At first, he did not realise that the work was by her but once he found out he contacted her offering her advice on painting for the future. This initial letter to her resulted in a long-running correspondence between them and genuine friendship that lasted for many years. In 1907 Sickert invited both Nan Hudson and Ethel Sands to join the Fitzroy Street Group, which he had just formed and meetings were held in his studio in Fitzroy Street, to the north of central London.  The reason for this invitation could be because he admired their work or cynics would say it was more to do with their financial and social status both of which Sickert wanted to “explore”.  Both women accepted the invitation. Their main purpose of the group was to explore contemporary styles and methods, which they believed would challenge the conventional traditions of the New England Art Club. It was to be the establishing of the first artists’ collective.

Ethel Sands by Lady Ottoline Morrell vintage snapshot print, 1909 NPG Ax140123 © National Portrait Gallery, London

In 1911 many of the Fitzroy Group Group’s members, including Walter Sickert, formed the nucleus of the new Camden Town Group, and by November 1913 the Fitzroy Street Group had ceased to exist.  Unfortunately for Ethel and Nan the Camden Town Group was only open to male artists and so neither Nan or Ethel were not invited to join this new group. However, in 1913, a new grouping was formed known as the London Group.  The London Group was formed by a merger of the Camden Town Group and the English Cubists, later known as the Vorticists. It was the coming together of radical young artists who were defying the stranglehold which the Royal Academy had on exhibiting new works of art. The group was open to both male and female artists and Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson became founder members.

The Visitor by Nan Hudson

Up till this time Nan Hudson had only exhibited her work in Paris at the Salon d’Automne but through Ethel Sand’s contacts within the London art scene she began to show her work in London and exhibited her work at the New English Art Club, the Allied Artists’ Association and the Leicester Galleries.

Château d’Auppegard by Nan Hudson

At the start of the First World War, Hudson and Sands went to France and helped set up a hospital for wounded soldiers near Dieppe. This was forced to close but Nan Hudson continued to nurse both in England and in France until autumn 1918.  During the spell in Normandy during the war Nan Hudson fell in love with the area and after the war in 1920, she bought the Château d’Auppegard.  It was a seventeenth-century house with a grey slate gabled roof which lay about ten miles inland from Dieppe in the Normandy countryside.  This became their dream home and she and Ethel Sands spent the summers together and devoted much time and energy in its restoration and decoration. The two women renovated the dilapidated dwelling, even commissioning murals from the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for the loggia.

A Dressing Room by Ethel Sands

Nan Hudson completed a painting depicting her beloved chateau which is now part of the Tate collection.  She used a restricted palette of cool tones.  The depiction is typical of her later works when she tended towards landscapes with an element of architectural interest.   From 1926 onwards Nan concentrated on depicting rural landscapes found around the outskirts of Dieppe and the commune of Auppegard.  Many other landscape works came from the extensive touring around France in the Spring and early Autumn done by her and Ethel Sands.

Honfleur Harbour by Nan Hudson

Very few of Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson’s paintings survived the Second World War. Ethel Sands’ house in London was destroyed following a direct hit on it during the Blitz which obliterated much of both of their work. As well as this, Château d’Auppegard itself sustained extensive damage from bombing and looting that followed, when many drawings and paintings, including a collection of works by Sickert and Augustus John, were stolen, never to be seen again. It is very likely that paintings by the Ethel and Nan were therefore lost too.  Ethel and Nan returned to Auppegard in May 1946 and were horrified to witness the devastation of their beloved home.   One visitor to the chateau was Vanessa Bell who visited them in that September and she wrote about what she witnessed first-hnd:

“…The house has been terribly damaged by a flying bomb which exploded near. They have managed to repair the worst things and when one drives up to it [it] is still very lovely. But inside only the dining room is usable, and they have hardly any furniture and just enough for themselves. Poor old things – as they say, they are too old to begin all over again and they certainly do look very aged and decrepit…”

Still Life with Picture of the Madonna by Ethel Sands

However. the two occupants of the chateau, both then in their seventies, would not be defeated by the devastation and set about trying to repair it.  Age finally defeated them as far as renovating the chateau and Nan began to worry about its fate once she and Ethel had died.  In the end they decided to give the house over to a young friend of theirs, an amateur painter, Louis le Breton, on the understanding that it would eventually be bequeathed to the French nation. He, like the two owners of the chateau, shared their passionate love of the house and they felt sure that after they had died, his love of the Auppegard property would be preserved and cherished. Hudson and Sands continued to live at the château within a specially adapted self-contained apartment but their careful planning for the future of the building came to naught when Louis le Breton pre-deceased both of them, dying suddenly in the garden at Auppegard in March 1957.

Still Life with Books and Flowers by Ethel Sands

Nan Hudson became too ill to live there and was cared for initially by her life-long companion, Ethel and latterly at a nursing home in Kilburn, London, dying just a few months later in September 1957 aged eighty-eight.

Auppegard Church from the Chateau by Ethel Sands

Her funeral was held at Auppegard and she was buried in the churchyard facing her beloved château.

Ethel Sands died on March 19th 1962, aged eighty-eight.

Nettie Blanche Lazzell

Blanche Lazell during her time at the Art Student League, New York

Cornelius Carhart Lazzell, a direct descendent of pioneers who settled in Monongolia County, West Virginnia, after the American Revolutionary War, married Mary Prudence Pope and the couple went on to have ten children, three sons and seven daughters.  The ninth child was Nettie Blanche Lazzell who was born on October 10th 1878 and it is she who is the subject of today’s blog. 

The Lazzell family, who were devout Methodists, lived on a large farmstead near Maidsville, West Virginia, which lies close to the Pennsylvania border.  The town was thought to have been named Maidsville on account of there being a large proportion of “old maids” among the first settlers !  Her education during her early days was at the one-room schoolhouse on the property where students from the first through to eighth grades were taught from October through February.

Amarylis by Blanche Lazzell (1930)

In 1891, when Blanche was just twelve years old, her mother died, aged 48. In her early teens Blanche experienced hearing problems and became partially deaf and it was not until a year later that a Baltimore doctor was able to remedy her illness.  In 1893, at the age of fifteen, Blanche enrolled at the West Virginia Conference Seminary, which is now the West Virginia Wesleyan College.  From there, in 1899, she transferred to the South Carolina Co-Educational Institute in Edgefield. Once she graduated from the Institute, she became a teacher at the Red Oaks School in Ramsey, South Carolina. In spring of 1900, she returned to her Maidsville home, where she tutored her younger sister, Bessie.   In 1901, she studied art at West Virginia University and did well, receiving a degree in art history and the fine arts in 1905.  She continued to study at WVU on a part time basis until 1909, allowing her to broaden her knowledge of art and twice substituting as a painting teacher.

West Virginnia Coal Works by Blanche Lazzell (1949)

In 1908, at the age of thirty, she moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League.  The League had been formed in 1875 to provide more variety and flexibility in education for artists than it was felt the National Academy of Design provided. This breakaway group of art students included many women, many of whom, in the late 1890s and early 1900s, took on key roles. In Marian Wardle’s book: American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-1945. She recounts the words of the American artist Edith Dimmock regarding the atmosphere at the Art League:

“…In a room innocent of ventilation, the job was to draw Venus (just the head) and her colleagues. We were not allowed to hitch bodies to the heads——yet. The dead white plaster of Paris was a perfect inducer of eye-strain and was called “The Antique.” One was supposed to work from “The Antique” for two years. The advantage of “The Antique” was that all these gods and athletes were such excellent models: there never was the twitch of an iron-bound muscle. Venus never batted her hard-boiled egg eye, and the Discus-thrower never wearied. They were also cheap models and did not have to be paid union rates…”

During her time at the Art League Blanche studied under Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase and one of her fellow students was Georgia O’Keeffe. 

SS. Ivernia

On July 3rd 1912, Lazzell set sail on an American Travel Club cruise on the Cunard liner SS Ivernia, crossing the Atlantic and arriving in England. From there Blanche visited the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy.  She was fascinated by the architecture of the various churches she visited.   

Sailboat by Blanche Lazzell

In August she left the tour party and travelled to Paris.  She then stayed in a pension in Montparnasse on the Left Bank.  She moved into the Students’ Hostel on Boulevard Saint-Michel, one of the two major streets in the Latin Quarter of Paris, running alongside the Luxembourg Gardens.  During her stay in the French capital, she took lessons at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Académie Julian, and Académie Delécluse.  She eventually established herself at the Académie Moderne where her tutors were the post-impressionist painters Charles Guérin and David Rosen.  Of all the art tuition she received in Paris she was the most contented with the ideas and techniques behind the Parisian avant-garde art, a genre which pushed the boundaries of ideas and creativity, which she learnt about at the Académie Moderne.

The Monongahela River at Morgantown by Blanche Lazzell (1939)

Blanche returned to America on the White Star passenger liner, SS Arabic, at the end of September 1913.  On her return to America Blanche went to live with her younger sister Bessie in Morgantown.  During her European travels Blanche built up a portfolio of sketches and paintings enough for her to have a solo exhibition in December 1914.  To make ends meet, she rented a studio in town and taught art as well as selling her hand-painted chinaware.

Byrdcliffe Artist Colony

Byrdcliffe Artist Colony

In the summer of 1917, Blanche spent time at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, an artists’ colony just outside Woodstock, New York.  The Byrdcliffe Art Colony was founded by Jane Byrd McCall and Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and colleagues, Bolton Brown, an artist and Hervey White, a writer.  The name of the colony came from an amalgamation of Jane and Ralph’s middle names.  It was founded in 1902 and the complex was formed of a number of Arts and Crafts cottages.  It was there that visual artists, poets, and musicians found their muses and spent time creating works of art, music and poetry. In later times famous people, such as Bob Dylan, writer Thomas Mann, and even famous actors, Helen Hayes, and Chevy Chase, spent time at Byrdcliffe.  Blanche studied under the Belgian-born artist William Schumaker who whilst in Paris had come into contact with European avant-garde artists.  On his return to America he brought with him modernist principles.  The term modernism in art was a rejection of history and conservative values such as realistic depiction of subjects; it was an innovation and experimentation with form, that is to say, the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work have a tendency towards abstraction.  From 1913 to 1931, Schumaker was artist-in-residence at the artists’ colony at Byrdcliffe.

Still Life by Blanche Lazzell

In 1918 Blanche Lazzell left Morganstown and moved permanently to Provincetown, which is situated on the northern tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a place she had previously visited in 1915.   She made the town her summer base while wintering back in Morganstown and Manhatten. 

Blanche Lazzell outside her Fish House studio, Princetown

She purchased an old fish house which overlooked the harbour of Provincetown and converted it into her studio.  She immersed herself into the local art scene and became a member of the Provincetown Art Association and the Sail Loft Club, Provincetown’s women’s art club.  She also became involved with the Provincetown Printers, a group of artists, most of whom were women, who created art using woodblock printing techniques.  It was a refuge for artists and a lively hub of experimentation and innovation. It became known as Princetown Print.  It was a white-line woodcut print, but it differed from woodcut printing as rather than creating separate woodblocks for each colour, one block was made and painted. Small groves between the elements of the design created the white line. In the main the artists often used soft colours, so that the finished product sometimes had the appearance of watercolour paintings.  Recalling her first summer at Provincetown, Blanche Lazzell fondly remembered her time there saying:

“…Hundreds of American artists who had been living in Europe before the first World War flocked to Provincetown. This quaint old seaport town, famous for the first landing place of the Pilgrims, was already an art colony…To be in Provincetown for the first time, in those days, under ordinary conditions was delightful enough, but that summer of 1915, when the whole scene, everything and everybody was new, it was glorious indeed–”

Untitled Abstract work by Blanche Lazzell

Lazzell returned to Paris in 1923 and studied with both Fernand Léger, Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes, who was said to be one of the founders of cubism. By 1925, Blanche had mastered the static and shuffled planes of Synthetic Cubism, to which she added her own distinctive colour palette and elegant receptivity. Blanche defined Cubism as:

“… the organization of flat planes of colour, with an interplay of space, instead of perspective…”

Princetown Backyards by Blanche Lazzell

This was a style which was excellently suited to her woodcuts and often mirrored the angular patterns of the Provincetown houses, rooftops, and wharves which are depicted in many of her woodcut prints.  It is also interesting to note that Lazzell was a passionate gardener, and images of flowers often featured in her work but even these images, although based on direct observation, were changed into recurrent interactions of abstracted shapes.

The Flaming Bush by Blanche Lazzell (1933) At auction it realized $87,500.

Blanche’s younger sister Bessie gave birth to a son, in August 1924 and Blanche decided to return to Morganstown to help her.  Lazzell also became a mentor and role model for her niece, Frances Reed, the daughter of her sister Myrtle.   Blanche eventually returned to Princeton in 1926 and one of her first tasks was to pull down her previous studio, the Fish House, as it was getting too cold in the winter months due to the numerous drafts.

The Violet Jug by Blanche Lazzell

Trees by Blanche Lazzell (c.1930)

In 1928 she was invited to be on the board of directors of the international art group, Société Anonyme. Lazzell later joined the New York Society of Women Artists and the Society of Independent Artists. In the 1930s, Blanche took part in an exhibition called Fifty Prints of the Year where she exhibited her compositions The Violet Jug and Trees.

Ecuyère (Horsewoman) by Albert Gleizes (c.1923)

Around the same time she produced a number of pure abstract compositions which shows the influence of Albert Gleizes.

In 1934, America was in the midst of the Great Depression and Blanche Lazzell was one of two West Virginian artists who received Federal Art Project grants through the Works Progress Administration.  This was due to the American government which hired hundreds of artists who collectively created more than 100,000 paintings and murals and over 18,000 sculptures to be found in municipal buildings, schools, and hospitals in all of the 48 states. President Franklin Roosevelt sought to put as many unemployed Americans as possible back to work and to buoy the morale of the citizens. Some of the 20th century’s greatest visual artists were employed by the FAP, along with many nascent Abstract Expressionists.

Blanche Lazzell on her porch of her Provincetown studio, 1942

Blanche Lazzell outside Little Church around the Corner, New York

In May 1956, Blanche Lazzell’s health began to fail and she was taken to a hospital with a suspected stroke.  Lazzell died on June 1st 1956 and she is buried next to her father in Bethel Cemetery in Maidsville.  She was aged 77.

Rowland Hilder

Rowland Frederick Hilder

The artist I am looking at today is the American-born English watercolourist Rowland Frederick Hilder, a great painter of English landscapes and seascapes.  Rowland was born to Roland and Kitty Hilder (née Fissenden) on June 28th, 1905 at Great Neck, a village on a peninsula on the North Shore of Long Island. 

Tyringham Hall by Rowland Hilder

In early 1915, following the outbreak of the First World War, Rowland’s father decided to return to England, and his native county of Kent, where his forbears had lived and he would enlist in the army and serve his country.  The Hilders set sail on the SS Lusitania, a liner which would be destroyed by a German submarine on its next transatlantic crossing in May of that year.

The First Snow by Rowland Hilder

Life at school was not a happy one for Rowland.  He was a tall gangling boy who had a pronounced American accent which went against him, both with his fellow students and some of the teachers.  Hilder was academically challenged and found it difficult to spell correctly.  Fortunately for him, the art master at the school encouraged him to sketch and advised his parents to let their son follow his love of art.

Watermill, Cambridgeshire by Rowland Hilder

Birdham Pool, Chichester by Rowland Hilder

Having shown a great talent for sketching, in 1921, at the age of sixteen, Rowland Hilder enrolled at Goldsmiths’ College in London, an art establishment which had established a reputation for nurturing fine draughtsmanship in its students.  He was initially placed in the etching class but couldn’t stand the smell of the acid so switched to illustration.  While studying illustration at Goldsmiths one of his tutors was the illustrator, Edmund (E.J.) Sullivan who had contributed illustrations for many of the great journals and magazines of the 1890s and Hilder looked up to him and regarded him as a true professional.  Sullivan taught Hilder the discipline of line drawing and with it the essential structure that holds any work of art together.  Hilder remembered his days at Goldsmiths and how Sullivan had encouraged his students to spend a great deal of time sketching.  Rowland was also introduced to the art of one of the greatest draughtsmen of the past, Albrecht Durer.

In Days of Sail by Rowland Hilder

Poole Harbour by Rowland Hilder

As time went by at Goldsmiths Rowland began to think about his future art career and what genre of painting he would like to follow.  At first he decided to become a marine painter and he spent much time on the waterfront sketching and painting boats.  Around this time he also won a prize in a competition sponsored by Cadburys for his work.  The prize, a travelling scholarship,  and Rowland used the money to travel to the Netherlands to study the works of the great Dutch Masters who depicted magnificent marine scenes.

Artist at Work (Edith Hilder by Rowland Hilder

Whilst studying at Goldsmiths, Rowland met fellow student Edith Blenkiron.  She was a botanical painter, and her depictions were often to be found on fabrics or pottery, illustrations for books, or simply painting pictures which could be hung on people’s walls. She said that she was most happy when working direct from nature.  Love blossomed and the couple married and went on to have two children.

Floral Arrangement by Edith and Rowland Hilder

Edith’s beautifully drawn and botanically accurate floral watercolours, with landscape backgrounds often painted by her husband proved very popular.  It was her floral depictions which brought her a following in her own right rather than be just considered as the wife of the artist Rowland Hilder.

During his period at Goldsmiths he completed a large drawing of a cable ship which was bought by two Royal Academicians, William Orpen and Arnesby Brown on behalf of the National Gallery of Australia .  Whilst at Goldsmith he was also approached by two book publishers. Jonathan Cape and Blackies, to illustrate their books of sea stories.  Both publishers were pleased with Hilder’s illustrations and in 1928, publishing house, Jonathan Cape, asked Rowland if he would contemplate switching from is favoured marine and seascapes and concentrate on depicting countryside landscape scenes as they would like him to illustrate books for Mary Webb, an author who had achieved considerable fame for her novel Precious Bane.

The publishers arranged that winter for Rowland Hilder, his mother and his soon to be wife Edith, to stay in Mary Webb’s cottage in the Shropshire countryside so he could familiarise himself with the rural surroundings in which her novel, Precious Bane, was set. Both his wife and mother would remain in the warmth of the indoors during the day, whilst Rowland would trudge through the snow and the frozen winter ground avidly collecting material, both for use in his illustrative work, but also for his newly found love of depicting the landscape in wintry conditions in his paintings.  Hilder was mesmerised by the rural beauty.  Views of the winter landscape astounded Hilder and he realised that the depiction of such beauty could prove popular with the public.  Many of his pictures were seen on greetings and Christmas cards.

World War II poster by Rowland Hilder

When the Second World War broke out in 1939 Rowland Hilder was one of the first artists who was approached by the government to design war posters which would rally round the people of Britain.  One such poster designed by him was Convoy your Country to Victory Save and Lend through our National Savings Group, which was issued and sponsored by the National Savings Committee, London; Scottish Savings Committee, Edinburgh; Ulster Savings Committee, Belfast and printed for H.M. Stationery Office.  The poster depicted merchant navy ships being escorted across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean under the watchful eye of a Royal Navy vessel which is seen flying the White Ensign.

Garden of England by Rowland Hilder

Another project Hilder was involved in was to provide black and white drawings for an illustrated bible.  This wartime bible contains many beautiful depictions of the English landscape, by Rowland Hilder as well as one or two other artists working in the same style.  The idea of this new book was stated in its preface – to give the people of today a copy of the Bible that is easy to read and that will take them at once to the heart of its message.  Some of the drawings depicted Biblical themes whilst others illustrated daily life in the mid twentieth century.

Treasure Island (1929) by Robert Louis Stevenson with twelve colour plates and some black and whight vignettes by Rowland Hilder

Rowland Hilder’s received numerous book illustration commissions included Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1929 edition of Treasure Island.

Landscape with Oast Houses by Rowland Hilder

Hilder achieved great popular success with his portrayal of the English countryside, notably Kent, with the characteristically delineated trees and oast-houses.

Shell advertising poster illustrated by Rowland and Edith Hilder

Shell Guide to May Lanes arranged and painted by Rowland and Edith Hilder

From the 1920s and into the 1950s, the Shell Oil company produced some beautiful advertising posters which many said, were the most beautiful ever produced.  Rowland and Edith Hilder collaborted on a number of the designs.   

In 1956, a book was published featuring the drawings and paintings of Edith and Rowland Hilder. Rowland also had his own books published: Starting with Watercolour and Painting Landscapes in Watercolour and the two volumes of his paintings under the titles Rowland Hilder’s England and Rowland Hilder Country..

After the Second World War, Rowland formed a small family business with his wife and father called The Heron Press which printed, amongst other things, greeting cards.  They became known as “Hilderscapes” a term that Hilder himself disliked.  In 1963 Rowland wanted to move away from his illustrative work and return to his first love, watercolour landscape painting and so he severed connections with the company. 

Shoreham in Kent by Rowland Hilder

Shoreham in Kent by Rowland Hilder

When it comes to locations for his paintings Rowland Hilder considered Shoreham, a village and civil parish in the Sevenoaks District of Kent, England, located 5.2 miles north of Sevenoaks. and the Shoreham Valley, as his first love.

Samuel Palmer ‘s “Barn in a Valley, Sepham Farm”

It was also here in the 1820s that Samuel Palmer, a key figure in Romanticism in Britain, produced visionary pastoral paintings of that area. Hilder tells of how he came across Shoreham:

“…Some fellow students and I discovered Palmer together when we were at Goldsmiths’ College, so I went out to find Shoreham for myself, taking a camera with me. I photographed the farms, and oasts and walked the lanes. I discovered one of my photographs was of Sepham Barn, one of Palmer’s subjects. It had not changed in a hundred years. Later when I went back it had been knocked downand a new tin one was there in its place. I can’t bring myself to include that modern version in my paintings of Shoreham…”

The Lane, High Halstow by Rowland Hilder

Twenty miles north-east of Shoreham lies the village of High Halstow and the surrounding area was the subject of Rowland Hilder’s studies for over fifty years. On one occasion Rowland and fellow Goldsmith student, Norman Hepple, during a sketching holiday, rented an old disused pub in the village. From the front windows they had a view of the neighbouring farm, which was situated in a lane which led to a bird sanctuary. Roland recalled the time:

“…We were invited by a keen bird watcher to join him in one of the hides, to watch a nest of baby herons. I disgraced myself by making an accidental noise, whereupon all the babies were simultaneously sick…”

Rowland Hilder’s sketch

The Old Ford and Bridge, Eynsford by Watercolour by Rowland Hilder

Eynsford is a village and civil parish in the Sevenoaks District of Kent and is a few miles north of Shoreham.   This area is undulating and has a large minority of woodland.    This was also a place Hilder visited many times to sketch and very little has changed since his time.  The bridge at Eynsford leads to a popular pub, the ruins of the local castle and many walks along the river Darent to Lullingstone bridge with its reconstituted Roman villa.

London Docklands by Rowland Hilder

Like his contemporaries, Claughton Pellew, John and Paul Nash, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious, Hilder shared their interests in depicting the countryside. They would explore themes of rural peace and harmony and rejected modernism. However, Pellew and Ravilious often depicted the clash between pastoral tranquillity and the rise of modernism whereas Hilder just concentrated on depictions of rural beauty whether it is bathed in sunshine or covered in snow and the by-gone aspects of farming practice.

First Snow by Rowland Hilder

Surprisingly Hilder was himself never taught watercolour. He honed the skills after his training, and he wrote several books on the subject.  He also taught his skills at Farnham School of Art, and as professor of art at his alma mater, Goldsmith’s. In 1938 he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Water Colours, and in 1964 he became president of the Institute.  His work was included in the 1984 Hayward Gallery exhibition: The British Landscape 1920-50. Retrospective exhibition at the Woodlands Gallery in 1985 and Hilder was appointed OBE in 1986. He lived in London but retained a base at Shell Ness, a small coastal hamlet on the most easterly point of the Isle of Sheppey in the English county of Kent. Where he would carry out his marine painting.  He continued to paint into his retirement and died in Greenwich on the 21st April 21st, 1993 two months before is eighty-eighth birthday.

  

In putting this blog together I was helped by information I found in the following websites:

THE BOOKROOM ART PRESS

The Watercolour Log

Ottalie Tolansky

After my very long last blog, here is a shorter one !

Ben Uri Gallery (Boundary Road, off Abbey Road, St John’s Wood, London)

When I was visiting London the other day, I visited the Ben Uri gallery in St John’s Wood, just off the famous Abbey Road.  I had been sent regular emails from the gallery about events and followed them on Facebook and was interested to visit the premises. 

The Girl in the Green Sari by Clara Klinghoffer

A few weeks ago I wrote about Clara Klinghoffer and I knew one of her paintings was at this gallery so I was interested to look at it up close.  I eventually found the gallery after going round in circles because I struggled to follow the GPS on my phone.  The gallery was much smaller than I had imagined but there on display was the Klinghoffer painting entitled The Girl in the Green Sari.

Girl in a Red Shirt by Ottilie Tolansky (c.1950)

The full-length painting was displayed in the small gallery and was quite impressive.  However, for me, more impressive was the full length painting next to it.  It was entitled Girl in a Red Shirt and the artist was given as Ottilie Tolansky and I knew I had to find out more about this unknown (to me) artist.

Self portrait by Ottilie Tolansky

Ottalie Pinkasovitch was born in Czernowitz, which was, at the time of her birth, in the northern Bukovian sector of the Austro-Hungary.  The town is now known as Chernivsti and is in western Ukraine.  She was born on May 30th 1912 into an Orthodox Jewish household.  Shortly after Ottalie was born, the town witnessed numerous riots directed against the Jewish community and so the family moved to live in Vienna.  For Ottalie, Vienna was home and she always looked upon herself as being Austrian. 

Reimann Art School in Berlin

In 1928, at the age of sixteen, the family were on the move again.  This time they set up home in Berlin where Ottalie’s father, an internationally recognised singer, took up the post of Obercantor at the city’s eighteenth century Alte Synagougue.  Meanwhile, the family having recognised that their daughter had a great talent for art decided to enter her into the Reimann School of Art in Berlin.  It was a private art school which had been founded in 1902 by Albert and Klara Reimann, and later in January 1937 was re-established in Regency Street, Pimlico, London following the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis. After leaving the Reimann School, she continued her studies at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.

Meadow Scene by Ottilie Tolansky

Hitler came to power in 1933 when he became the German Chancellor and with growing antisemitic views which swept the country the Pinkasovitch family moved to the safety of England.  Ottilie’s father accepted a job at a synagogue in Cheetham Hill, which was the predominantly Jewish area of Manchester.  Ottilie, who was enrolled at the Manchester Municipal School of Art, once again came into contact with her friend, the physicist Samuel Tolansky who was working at the University of Manchester. 

Mary Louise by Ottalie Tolansky

Samuel Tolansky had been born on November 17th 1907 in Newcastle upon Tyne. His parents had migrated to Great Britain around the turn of the century. His ancestors had come from Odessa but were of Lithuanian Jewish origin. Samuel was the second child in a family of two boys and two girls. His father was a tailor and, like most immigrants from Eastern Europe at the time, he had to start near the bottom of the ladder both financially and socially.  For the first ten years of life in England Samuel’s father lived in conditions of considerable poverty and that his son’s progress up the educational ladder was, at every critical stage, dependent on his ability to win scholarships and other awards.  However, Samuel worked hard and succeeded.

Samuel Tolansky

Ottilie had first met Samuel in Berlin in 1931 when he had been working at the Physikalisch-Technische Reicsansalt, a German government scientific institute.   In 1932, after a year working at the Berlin Institute he went to England and attended Imperial College London as a researcher into interferometry.  He remained in London until 1934.  From Imperial College London he relocated to Manchester and from 1934 to 1947 worked at the University of Manchester, as an Assistant Lecturer, later Senior Lecturer and Reader.  Ottilie and Samuel’s friendship blossomed and the couple found themselves in love.  The couple married in 1935.  Ottilie gave birth to their first child, Ann, who is now married and having graduated in history from Oxford University, became a solicitor. A second child, Jonathan, was born in London. He became a musician, a percussionist who has played in several of the leading orchestras.

Abstract by Ottilie Tolansky

Samuel and Ottilie Tolansky left Manchester and moved to London, where, after the war had ended, she attended the Hammersmith School of Art and regularly submitted her work at various exhibitions.  Ottilie’s portraiture, still lifes and figure drawings, which she completes mainly in oils and gouache are characterised by her main use of blues and violets.

Rabbi Joseph Trostmann by Ottilie Tolansky (c.1962)

One of her most famous portraits, in fact two paintings, is of her grandfather Rabbi Joseph Trostmann.  She based the depiction of the elderly man on her childhood recollections and family photographs.  One can be found at Stoke-on-Trent Art Gallery whilst the other was kept in the family.  After Ottilie died, her son Jonathan Tolansky, donated it to the Ben Uri Gallery.

Portrait of a Gentleman by Ottilie Tolansky

Ottilie Tolansky died in London on February 13th 1977 aged 64.  Her husband who had been nominated for a Nobel Prize, and was a principal investigator to the NASA lunar project known as the Apollo program, died four years earlier.

Edward Darley Boit and his Daughters

Edward Darley Boit

For this blog I am reverting to my early modus operandi when I concentrated the blog on one painting, rather than, as I do nowadays, focus on the artist(s). Having said that, the blog revolves around two American artists, one who is rightly categorised as one of the great nineteenth century painters and the other, who is less well-known, is now almost forgotten.   One is the artist who painted the work and the other is the father of the four girls who are depicted in the painting.  The artist was John Singer Sargent, the  American expatriate painter, considered the leading portraitist of his generation  and the father  of the girls depicted in the work  is Edward Darley Boit, a watercolour painter from Boston.  The work of art I am featuring is entitled The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, which was originally titled Portraits d’enfants.

John Singer Sargent – Self-Portrait (1906) 

Edward Darley Boit Jnr., known as Ned, was born in 1840.  His father, also Edward Darley Boit, was a Harvard-educated lawyer and his wife was Jane Parkinson Hubbard whom he married in 1839.  Jane’s family, the Hubbards, were an old New England family who owned sugar plantations in British Guyana.  The couple had three sons, Edward (Ned), Robert (Bob) and John and two daughters, Jane and Elizabeth.  His son, Edwards Darley Boit Jnr. studied at the Boston Latin school and then Harvard where he graduated in 1863.  From there he went on to study at Harvard Law School.

Mrs Edward Darley Boit(Mary Louisa Cushing) by John Singer Sargent (1887)

Edward’s love of legal matters soon waned despite his aptitude in his legal studies.  However it was his love of art which came to the fore in his life but it was not just art that was to enter his life.  There was a woman who would take a leading role in the life of Edward (Ned) Darley Boit junior.  She was Mary Louisa Cushing, known simply as Isa, who was part of the upper-class Bostonian Society.  Her great uncle was Thomas Handasyd Perkins hailed from a wealthy Boston Brahmin family and was an American merchant, slave trader, smuggler, philanthropist and early patron of the Arts. Isa’s father, John Hubbard, worked for his uncle’s merchant’s businesses in China.  He returned to America in 1831, a very wealthy man and a very eligible bachelor.  Isa’s father met and fell in love with her mother, Jane Parkinson, and the couple married in 1839.  In 1840, they moved to their Bellmont estate in Watertown, Massachusetts.  They had five children, four sons and one daughter, Mary Louisa (Isa).  Isa was brought up in a wealthy household and wanted for nothing.

Edward and Isa’s summer home, The Rocks

Despite her wealthy upbringing, tragedy was to strike Isa in 1862 when she was still only sixteen years old.  In April of that year her father died, aged 75 and less than two months later, in early July her mother Mary Louisa Cushing died.  She was 63.  Isa went live with her elder brother Ned who acted as her legal guardian. On June 16th 1864, with the American Civil War still raging, twenty-four-year-old Edward Darley Boit, who was still studying law and was exempt military service, and seventeen-year-old Isabel Louisa Cushing married in an Episcopal ceremony at Christ Church in Harvard Square, Boston.  It was a sumptuous, no-expense spared affair.  The young couple split their time between Boston and Newport, Rhode Island where they had their summer house built.  It was known as The Rocks, and was situated above Bailey Beach and just along from Isa’s brother, Robert’s home.

Biarritz by Edward Darley Boit

In April 1865 Isa Boit gave birth to their first child, named Edward after his father but was known as Neddie.  The following year Edward Darley Boit was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar and once again Isa was pregnant.  That summer Edward Boit, his pregnant wife and their son travelled to Europe visiting Dublin, Paris, Rome before returning to the French capital.  Throughout the European journeys Edward was continually visiting the major city art galleries and absorbing as much as the European art as he could.  In the Autumn of 1886 they returned to London where Isa gave birth to their second child, a son called John.  Neither Isa nor John were well following a problematic birth but their travels continued and they returned to Paris, their favourite city, in mid-December 1866.  However Edward wanted to once again visit Italy to study the works of the Italian Renaissance Masters and so Edward, Isa, Neddie and baby John went to Rome visiting Genoa and Florence en-route.  Five month old baby John was became very ill and never recovered his health. He died in March 1867 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.  Edward, Isa and Neddie returned to Boston where Edward resumed his legal career.

Italian Landscape by Edward Darley Boit

Edward Boit visited an art exhibition at Boston’s Soule and Ward gallery and for him it was a magical visit and he was overwhelmed by the landscape work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and how the French painter had managed to capture the light, air and atmosphere in his works.  It was an epiphany for Boit who there and then decided that he would give up law and become a painter and furthermore he and the family would leave America and live in Paris.  Edward’s wife Isa supported him both passionately and financially having received a sizeable inheritance from her late parents.  Isa preferred life in Paris to that of life in Boston. 

Poppi in the Casentino, Tuscany by Edward Darley Boit

Whilst in Newport Rhode Island, the size of the Boit family had  increased.  A daughter, Florence, was born on May 6th 1868 and a second daughter, Jane, was born on January 17th  1870.  There was one major problem to the Paris relocation plans.  Their eldest son, now five-years-old, suffered from severe mental retardation and was now living in a “home”.  Edward and Isa had a heartbreaking decision to make as to whether to stay in Boston to be near him, albeit he didnt recognise them and could not communicate or leave their son behind when they emigrated to Paris.  After a lot of soul searching they decided to relocate the family and leave Neddie behind in the specialist home. In the Autumn of 1871, Boit gave up his conventional legal life, and the couple sold their Newport home and moved to Europe with the family, visiting Italy first then travelling around the French countryside before arriving at their ultimate destination, Paris.  One of the first things Boit picked up about French art was the way they cared less for detail and concentrated on overall effect liberation.  Edward Boit and his family split their time between Paris and Rome and enjoyed all that French and Italian society had to offer.  Among the close friends they met were the author,  Henry James and the young artist Frederic Crowninshield both of whom had connections with Boston.  In 1876 Boit decided to make Paris his base and had rented a studio at 139 boulevard Montparnasse in the city’s Left Bank artist quarters.  At the start of his Parisian residency he began to be tutored by the French landscape artist François-Louis Français, who himself had been a pupil of Corot, one of Boit’s favourite painters.

Avenue de Friedland, Paris.

In 1874 the Boit family increased with the birth of a third daughter, Mary Louisa on June 5th in Paris and eighteen months later on November 15th 1878 a fourth daughter, Julia, was born in the northern Paris suburb of Soissy.  Edward and Isa decided that it was now time to return to America for a long stay so as to introduce their daughters to their uncles and grandparents and in mid-June 1879 they, along with European governesses and nurses, boarded SS Bothnia for the Atlantic sea passage.  Great celebrations followed their arrival and Edward’s parents looked forward to Edward and his family remaining over the winter months in Boston, but their hopes were dashed when Edward outlined his plans to return to Paris. The voyage back to France took place in early October 1879. On arriving back in Paris they took a large apartment on the avenue de Friedland, a large boulevard that radiated out from the Place d’Etoile,

Portrait of Robert de Cévrieux with his Pet Dog by John Singer Sargent

There is some doubt as to when Edward and Isa Boit met the artist, John Singer Sargent but it is thought most likely it was in Paris in the late 1870s during one of the many artistic soirees that the Boits and Sargent frequented.  Another possible reason was the meeting came about through the auspices of Edward Boit’s teacher, François-Louis Français, whose close friend was Carolas-Duran, one of Singer Sargent’s tutor.   Sargent was an expert portraitist and a third of them were commissions to paint children.  An example of one such painting is Sargent’s 1879 Portrait of Robert de Cévrieux with his Pet Dog.  We see him standing on an oriental rug in front of a curtained backdrop.

Portrait of Edouard and Marie-Loise Pailleron by John Singer Sargent (1881)

Another child portrait by Sargent was a commission from one of Sargent’s earliest patrons, Edouard Pailleron, the French poet and dramatist.  Sargent had completed a portrait of Edouard and his wife in 1879 and two years later,  a portrait of Edouard’s two children, sixteen-years-old Edouard and his younger sister, Marie-Louise, which was exhibited at the 1881 Salon.  The children’s portrait was time consuming and Marie-Louise, later recorded that there were eighty-three sitting for this painting which might explain why the subjects seem strangely remote from the artist.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargent (1882)

The painting I am concentrating on in this blog, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, is one that Sargent started on in October 1882 after he returned to Paris from Italy.  He completed the work in December, a mere two months later. This was a great achievement as the painting was so large (225 x 255 cms) 87.6 inches square. Sargent titled the painting Portraits of Children and it was then shown at Georges Petit’s Exposition de la Société Internationale and the following year at the Salon.    It is an unusual depiction in as far as, that besides the four girls and two large vases, the location seems empty, even stark.  This would be completely different to the real Boit household which was known to be full of furnishings which they had collected on their travels over the years.  The stylistic interior tastes of the Boits is not reflected in this portrait with the exception of the vases.  Maybe Edward and Isa first approached Sargent tasking him to paint a traditional portrait of their four daughters but subsequently they may have acceded to Sargent’s decision to make the depiction part portraiture and part an interior genre painting.

Mary Louisa (Isa) Boit

The setting for this portrait is one of the rooms in the family’s spacious apartment, possibly the foyer.  Edward and Isa had moved into the apartment on the avenue de Friedland, a large boulevard that radiated out from the Place d’Etoile, Their elegant residence was situated in the eighth arrondissement, a luxurious neighbourhood much preferred by wealthy Americans.  They had lived there since 1879 when they had arrived back from a summer in Newport, Rhode Island.  It was to be home to the Boits until 1886.

Julia Overing Boit

In the painting, the light comes from the left. The two older daughters are shielded from it by the recessed enclave they stand in, a position which they have found for their uneasy refuge. All the girls wear white pinafores, which gives Sargent the opportunity to show off his absolute mastery of a full range of tones created by the folds and creases in the pinafores. It was a dark shadowy space in which Sargent then positioned the Boits’ four daughters.   The youngest daughter, four-year-old Julia sits on the floor, eight-year-old Mary Louisa stands at the left midground of the painting whilst the two older daughters, Jane, aged twelve, and Florence, fourteen, stand in the background, partially obscured by shadow. 

Painting with the vases at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Besides the four girls the other striking feature of the painting is the inclusion of the two tall vases.  These were not Sargent’s props but two Japanese vases owned by the Boits, which Sargent faithfully depicted, although he subdued the colour allowing the girls to be the more important.  The vases, like their owners, criss-crossed the Atlantic more than a dozen times and only suffered minor damage to their rims.  They were six feet tall giants, the tops of which flared into scalloped ripples of porcelain.  The size of them dwarfed the girls.  They were made in Arita, Japan an area famous for its porcelain, which in the late nineteenth century was specifically made for export to the West. The two oversize Japanese porcelain vases depicted in the work were, along with the painting, also donated by the Boit family to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and are exhibited beside Sargent’s painting.

Florence Dumaresq and Jane Hubbard Boit

The painting by Sargent is not a conventional group portrait as Sargent has positioned the four girls individually.  There is no connection between the siblings.   The two older sisters are placed in the semi-shade in the background while the youngest is centre stage in the foreground holding her doll and the other girl is standing alone off to the left.  Each of the girls is presented individually, but the features of the two older girls are obscured, by the darkness of the background.  The presence of empty space, and the isolation of the figures all add to the sense of quiet anxiousness. Florence with her back to the vase comes over as being independent and refuses to participate at all and Jane, facing us, is left unsure whether to side with her big sister or to emerge from the shadows and face the artist.

Las Meninas by Velazquez (1656)

Many art historians have likened the position of the girls with way Velazquez set up the figures in his painting, Las Meninas, the famous portrait of the young Spanish infanta with her maids in a great shadowed room.  Sargent had studied and copied this work during his 1879 visit to the Prado in Madrid. 

A composite image of Las Meninas by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargent. 

The relationship between these two works was considered so noteworthy that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston who owned the Boit family portrait loaned it to the Museo del Prado in 2010, so that the paintings could be exhibited together for the first time. 

Malcolm Rogers, the director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts at the time of the loan, when asked about the similarity of the two works of art stated;

“…These two great paintings have never been together in one room before……It is Sargent’s greatest painting, one of the great paintings of childhood and for it to hang side by side with arguably the world’s greatest portrait of childhood has to be a historic and iconic moment. I think people will be very moved…”

When the Daughters of Edward Darley Boit was first exhibited in 1883, the depiction of the children was the subject of much discussion. Many art critics were confounded as to why the children were so isolated from each other and also why is one in profile and almost indistinct?  Again Malcolm Rogers postulated:

“…The Boit daughters is just one of those paintings that moves people because of its beauty, but also its mystery.  You don’t quite know what these four girls are thinking; it opens up your own imagination. It’s got a little bit of sadness, a little bit of happiness, a little bit of childishness, great beauty. It is a very intriguing work…”

I will end this blog with a brief summary of what happened to the family. Isa, Edwards wife, was taken ill in the summer of 1894 and by the Autumn she had suffered from increasing paralysis of her limbs and both her heart and lungs began to fail. She died in Dinard, France on September 29th 1894 aged forty-eight and was buried in Paris, the city she loved so much. Edward refused to return to Boston in deference to Isa who had hated living in the American city.

In Biarritz, in the summer of 1895, Edward became re-aquainted with a young girl, Florence McCarty Little, who he had first met in Boston and was a firend of his twenty-one year-old daughter Isa. To everybody’s shock and his daughters’ horror Edward and Florence became very close and and they announced their impending marriage. Florence was thirty-six years younger than Edward.

Edward Darley Boit and F lorence set June 1896 for the marriage ceremony but it was postponed until October. His four daughters were sent back to Boston to stay with their aunt, Jane Boit Hunnewell in Wellesley. Edward’s brother Bob tried to dissuade his brother from marrying such a young girl saying that he was acting like a selfish, infatuated, silly school-boy and that he was appalled by his brother’s “abandonment” of his children. His daughters’ cousin Mary Boit returned to Paris with the four girls in October and wrote about the atmosphere at her cousins’ home:

“…I think he seems quite pre-occupied and now we are over hereUncle Ned says he is going to marry Florence Little next month. Well it is a very strange thing and I am more sorry for the girls than anything. poor dears, it seems so queer to look at Uncle Ned then think he is in love with somebody my age…”

Edward Darley with his sons, Julian and Edward.

The marriage finally took place in Biarritz on January 5th 1897 and on June 21st 1900 Florence gave birth to their first child, a son, Julian. Two years later, on April 12th 1902 she gave birth to their second son, Edward. Sadly, two weeks after the birth of Edward, Florence contracted a fever and died on April 24th, aged 25. Edward Darley Boit died of arteriosclerosis in Rome on April 21st 1915, three weeks before his 75th birthday.

None of the four daughters, depicted in the painting, married. The eldest, Florence Dumaresq died in 1919, aged 51. The second born daughter, Jane Hubbard Boit had suffered a nervous breakdown and never completely recovered. Her father was concerned that she would end up in a mental asylum like his first-born, Neddie. She improved and in fact, went to live on her own in a Paris apartment. She died in New York State in November 1955, aged 85. Mary Louisa Boit, the girl who stood alone on the left of Sargent’s painting, and who was looked upon as the prettiest of the four girls, died in New York in June 1945, aged 71.

Woman in Blue, Apartment in Paris by Julia Overing Boit (1921)

The youngest aughter, Julia Overing Boit, became a talented watercolour painter and often her letters contained small watercolour sketches. Her work was exhibited in many exhibitions and in March 1929 at the Copley Gallery in Boston, sixty-six of her watercolours were exhibited. She died in February 1969, aged 91.

Most of the information for this blog came from an excellent book which I bought from Amazon. It is entitled Sargent’s Daughters, The biography of a portrait, by Erica E Hirshler. If you would like a greater in-depth read about the Boit family and the painting, this is a must-have book.