WOMAN IN ART
so interested in her work that he invited an exhibition of it at his New York Gallery, a great compliment to the artist.
The show was held in 1910. Among its more important canvases were the "Sleeping Child" and "On the Stairs," both purchased afterward in California and presented to public galleries, the first to the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the second to the Pasadena Art Gallery. Other canvases sold in New York; one by invitation was exhibited in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D. C., another at the Pennsylvania Academy, and yet another traveled to the International Exposition in Buenos Aires. Two crossed the Atlantic to be shown in the Grafton Galleries, London. These, unfortunately, making their return trip on the Titanic, were lost.
Thus, though the artist has never left the country of her birth, her pictures have traveled far and wide.
The third phase of the artist's life, the more leisurely, was now beginning, and it opened auspiciously with perhaps the finest and most important portrait she ever painted, that of Dr. David Starr Jordan, a full-length, life-size canvas ordered for Stanford University. It was followed by a portrait of Dr. Branner who took the presidential chair when Dr. Jordan retired. Her last large genre picture of her favorite subject, "The Young Mother," took the silver medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915. But between then and now there have been many other canvases, and at the present time and at an age somewhat past seventy, Mary Curtis Richardson is engaged on a portrait group of a mother and her four sons.
California has called to the east with varying voices, and its inducements have been manifold. From the path-finder over unknown mountains and the discouraging stretches of plains, and the voices that echoed, Eureka! Eureka! Gold! to the whirring biplane annihilating time and distance, the alluring majesty of mountains, canyons, waterfalls and trees of nature's primal pattern—all have voiced the call to the east from the west.
Remembering that art follows prosperity as its shadow, the Twentieth Century looks along the western slope of the Rocky Mountains—and finds art, finds it at home, working in its studio; finds that art came some of the way in a covered wagon; some of the way on foot; some by way of the Isthmus of Panama.
But Art is at home on the Pacific Coast, and woman no less than man is building her art and cultural influence into our western heritage.
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