WOMAN IN ART
know that she had passed to the spirit land. She was born in Lima, Ohio, April 6th, 1868, and died May 13th, 1919, at Pasadena, California—a pioneer in America in color etching, original in her expression of beauty.
A full collection of her prints and many paintings are in the National Gallery at Washington, and in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and in the Art Institute of Chicago. Miss Hyde's work is known the world over, wherever art is to be reckoned with.
The work of Rowena Meeks Abdy needs to be reckoned with in American Art by woman, for in a sense she is a pictorial historian, and we have need of yet more such themes.
She was born in Vienna, Austria, April 24, 1887. Her parents were Americans. The daughter has adopted California as her state; her love and appreciation of it as a state, and its beauty and grandeur, have induced her to know it from the towering crown of Mount Shasta to the drooping palms of San Diego. Her method of accomplishment was unique. The interior of her sedan was remodeled and fitted as a studio on wheels. The quiet and privacy of locked doors permitted her to sketch in comfort, free from dust, wind, and the too-inquisitive audiences by the wayside.
Her appreciation and valuation of times and things that are passing have prompted the painting of scenes of "Old California Days." A picture of Main Street in the early Spanish days is of exceeding interest. Its story-and-a-half buildings seem to run down toward the bay. Gnarled and crooked trees grow where nature planted them, and donkeys and burros were a means of transportation.
"The Casa of the Commandante," its facade presenting two stories and verandas, with the distant view across the bay, gives a picture of the primitive town. Old pepper trees seem to reach down and finger the mosses on the old roof. On another canvas she views from the hill top the phoenix-like city rising from the ashes of fire and earthquake; remaining ruins form the foreground, while the background is the blue and silver distance of the bay.
Rowena Abdy has a far-seeing and a constructive mind. The Now moves her to preserve for the future the progress of yesterday. She has not only pictured pioneer days in California, but has carried paint box and easel along the Ohio River and gained inspiration and studies to represent the days when Ohio was near the western boundary of the nation, when navigation on the Ohio River was of great commercial value.
"On the Coast Near Monterey" is one of her larger oil paintings. Her color
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