WOMAN IN ART
suggestive of nature, satisfying to the eye and prompting the desire to be in the open.
Her masterpiece, a large canvas, portrays "The Russet Year," and is rich with the colors and dignity of a group of supurb oaks. The Art Institute of Chicago is to be congratulated that this canvas belongs to its permanent collection.
Annie Shaw's painting proves it the result of observation, not too broad handling, elimination of unnecessary detail, with a leafiness that is penetrable, and the atmosphere that is true to the season. The passing of a woman so gifted seems premature at thirty-five, a greater promise unfulfilled. She had a rare sense of color and atmosphere, and notable in her career is her Americanism. She lived, worked, and died in her own country.
Elizabeth Nourse is another American artist who has become a habitant of Paris, making her home at Rue d'Assas, where she has the outlook over the beautiful garden of the Luxembourg. She was born in Cincinnati, 1860. Her forebears were of Huguenot stock, who settled in New England in "sixteen something," as she expressed it. Her father, with the convincing name of Caleb Nourse, made Cincinnati his home in the nineteenth century, and courted her mother, Elizabeth LaBreton Rogers, in the home of her uncle, Samuel Rogers, where she married. The fine old house has since become the Longworth home.
There were four daughters in the Nourse family, each born with a talent to be developed and used. Kate, who died early, was a fine musician; Louise, a versatile linguist, homes in Paris with her sister Elizabeth the artist; and Mrs. Adelaide Pittman of Cincinnati is the sculptor of the group.
It it almost universal that a genius shows the nature of his gift at an early age, and Elizabeth Nourse, following the nature of things, took to pencil and paper, and the results of her efforts sent her to study seriously at the Cincinnati Academy of Art. Her talent was soon recognized, and after four years of study, she was offered the position of art instructor, but she preferred to develop her own talent, and again, following the stream of gifted Americans, she found herself in Paris. Going to France was expensive, and the exchequer of the family was low at the time. The parents had both died, but the two sisters were determined. The father's fortune had been swept away in a postwar panic, but, nothing daunted, the girls taught and saved, and gathered the wreck of their father's fortune, until they had five thousand dollars, with which they ventured to Paris.
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