WOMAN IN ART
great company of pupils testify to her helpfulness in the outspreading of American Art.
Her public exhibitions began in Manchester Academy, and the Dudley Gallery in England, when she showed many thoroughly good water colors, achieving distinction in that line of art.
In New York her pictures were seen in almost every exhibition, winning the artist a gold medal at the Prize Fund Exhibition, and one of silver at the Triennial Exhibition in Boston. Bronze medals rewarded her work at the Columbian Fair in Chicago in 1893; the Pan-American Exhibit at Buffalo, 1901; at St. Louis in 1904; and at Charlotte, South Carolina. She was a member of the National Arts Club, Pen and Brush Club, American Water Color Society, Woman's Art Club, honorary member of the Art Association of Canada, and the Art Students' League of New York. In social clubs she was a member of the Nineteenth Century, the Banard, and the Cosmopolitan.
During 1915 Mrs. Nicholls was at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, which permitted her an artist's appreciation of the glories of America. Years of suffering have prevented recent painting.
Miss Jessie Willcox Smith was one of the trio who began art study in the fine old house at "Villa Nova," just out of Philadelphia, under supervision and criticism of Mr. William Sartain. Later in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts she worked under the guidance of Howard Pyle, also in Drexel Institute. She is a member of the Water Color Club of New York and the one in Philadelphia, also of the Art Alliance of Philadelphia, and is Fellow of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Miss Smith was awarded a bronze medal at the exposition at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1902; the Mary Smith prize in 1903; silver medal at St. Louis in 1904; the Beck Prize at Philadelphia in 1911; and silver medal for water color at the Panama-Pacific, San Francisco, 1915.
Jessie Wilcox Smith is singularly gifted for her line of art. Children's books are more important than those for adults, for they lay the foundation for the taste in books that comes later. Miss Smith pictures fairy folk and real folk as fascinating to grown-ups as to eager little minds that feed on color and what other children in books are doing. "At the Back of the North Wind" is a charming story and acquaints a child with the fact and meaning of pathos. The dear little boy's cot is by the hay-mow in the barn, and at first he cannot sleep because the North Wind talks to him. Miss Smith has painted such dear pictures that father or mother will have to read the story to know what the North Wind says. For more than fifty years children have loved another of George Mac-
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