ter won wide reputation as a gifted portrait painter. Ethel Wright's beautiful painting "The Song of the Ages" belongs to the best examples of English art. Clara Montalba is favorably known for her splendid scenes of Venice, and landscapes of the Adriatic coasts. Elizabeth Thompson demonstrated by many excellent sketches and pictures that women are not afraid to make a specialty of battle scenes.
Ambitious American women are likewise hard at work gaining honor and laurels in the various fields of art. The morning promises fair, as there are already many shining names upon the scroll. To begin with one of the middle of the last century, we mention Cornelia Adele Facett, whose chief work, "The Election Commission in Open Session," contains 258 portraits of men and women, prominent in the political, literary, scientific and social circles of their time. It adorns the Senate Chamber in the Capitol at Washington.
The most brilliant woman artist of the United States is without question Cecilia Beaux, a Philadelphian, who, as a portrait painter, compares with the very best of any nation. Her portrait of a "Girl in White," owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, verifies what a critic said about her: "Miss Beaux has approached the task of painting the society woman of to-day, not as one to whom this type is known only by exterior, but with a sympathy as complete as a similar tradition and artistic temperament will allow. Thus she starts with an advantage denied to all but a very few American portrait painters, and this explains the instinctive "way in which she gives to her pictured subjects an air of natural ease and good breeding."
Sadie Waters, born in St. Louis, produced a number of religious paintings, her best and largest showing the Madonna in a bower of roses.
Violet Oakley of New Jersey had a prominent part in decorating the new Capitol at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, one of the most elaborate and costly public buildings in America. The mural painting "The Romance of the Founding of the State" in the Governor's room is her work. Anna Mary Richards excelled as a marine painter. Her large canvass "The Wild Horses of the Sea" has been especially admired.
Anny Shaw, Grace Hudson, Lucie Fairchild Fuller, Mary Cassatt, and Matilde Lotz are among the latest women artists of America, favorably known for many creditable works.
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Although comparatively few women have devoted themselves to sculpture, there are several among them well worth mentioning.
The first female sculptor of whom anything is known, was Sabina von Steinbach, a daughter of Erwin von Steinbach,
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