WOMAN IN ART
Her first public exhibition was with the American Water Color Society, when she was twelve years of age. Her showing was of six large flower panels, and five were sold before ten o'clock of the morning of the opening. The Society of American Artists accepted her work about the same time, and there she exhibited a turkey she had seen in a butcher's window. So her developing progressed, and at sixteen she knew she was to paint animals. The head of a calf was pronounced "thoroughly correct." Then the young artist began a thorough study of anatomy, and the study of landscape under Charles Melville Dewey, and at once combined the two interests.
In 1889 she went to France with her mother, beginning at once to study with Jules Dupre. A second year was spent in Holland with Brisbing (Henry), the well-known American animal painter, living there at the time. Mrs. Brown and her daughter took a house on the dyke at Hattem, a town with an eleventh century wall which gave a feeling that they were back in mediaeval times. They bought calves at a nearby Fair, which were exchanged for others after being painted. One little creature rebelled at the enforced posing and tugged at the rope that held him in the shade of a fruit tree. But he was painted nevertheless, and on Miss Brown's return to America she sent it to the Columbian Fair in 1893, where it was sold almost immediately.
Miss Brown's first important exhibition was in the gallery of George A. Glaenzer, No. 33 East 28th Street, New York. Press notices were most favorable, and exhibiting artists were most encouraging also. In 1899 Matilda Brown won the Dodge Prize at the National Academy of Design, and in 1901 the third Hallgarten Prize. In 1907 her picture at the Academy of Design, entitled "Near the Quarry," was purchased from the exhibition by Mr. F. S. Church as the best cattle picture there. She won the Charles Noel Flagg prize at the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts in 1919. The painting was of larger size than most others from her studio. It was well-balanced; the glow of light beneath the gathering clouds in the zenith is most naturally depicted, touching to high-light the white on the Holsteins as they saunter at a comfortable gait to the place "Where the Cattle Come to Drink."
Matilda Brown has proved herself a sculptor no less than a painter of animal life; as Helen Comstock expressed Mrs. Van Wyck's present status in art, "It is becoming a question whether to give precedence to Matilda Brown the sculptor or to Matilda Brown the painter." In either case she is Mrs. Frederick Van Wyck.
Sheep are usually restive models, but despite the fact, Miss Brown has caught
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