WOMAN IN ART
colors. She supplemented studio work by copying masters in the Prado, the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, and in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
Her contributions to the exhibitions in New York and elsewhere have awakened much interest, for her original paintings are of human experiences that stand for more than paintings of technique and harmony. "The Last Letter" speaks for itself; the "Discovery" is one of her most interesting works. "The Blind Fiddler" mingles its mission in a vein of pathos, as does "The Old Cobbler."
At the St. Louis Exhibition, 1904, Clara MacChesney was represented by "A Good Story' told by an old man, and it drew as much of a crowd to see him tell it as if they could hear it. It was a canvas of general interest, and it scored for the old man as it surely did for the artist, judging from the expressions and smiles as people passed before it. That picture captured the second Hallgarten prize at the Academy of Design.
Miss MacChesney has the interest and ability that has added greatly to the literature of art also.
Since the years of Symbert and Benjamin West there have been interchanges of talent between the British Isles and the United States in the matter of the Fine Arts. Born to the east of the Atlantic, some have worked and died on the western continent; and others born in the sunset land have worked and gained world fame amid treasures and antiquities of the old historic world. Next to people and commerce, art seems to have been the third step toward the oneness of the English-speaking nations. The greater the numbers that mark our annual calendars, the larger the numbers that form this interchange in art.
Rhoda Holmes Nicholls was born in the ancient town of Coventry, in the very heart of England, in 1854. As a young man her father was vicar at the historic little church of Stoke Poges, thence to Coventry, and other removes took the family to Littlehampton, in Sussex, where Rhoda Holmes spent her earliest years. From ten to sixteen she was in Miss Hawley's Boarding School in London. At nineteen she began art studies at the Royal Female School of Art, and took the Queen's Scholarship. While there the superintendent took six of the best students for a trip to Italy; later on, she decided to live there, as her father had died and the rest of the family had all gone to the Cape of Good Hope to live. She has said, "I had more charming things to paint, made worthwhile studies and more money, and found living much cheaper in Italy. I was two winters in Rome, one was spent in Miss Mayer's Art Establishment for students, and the next winter with some American friends I had met in Venice
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