WOMAN IN ART
Isabel Whitney paints in the style of our grandmothers' day, accurately, even meticulously, which tends almost to primness.
Yet another contemporary artist with flowers is Mary Prindeville. She paints on glass with black beneath, producing an artistic effect, but the flowers do not seem to be at home. Some are well painted, but the environment suggests craftsmanship.
Mary Townsend Mason, Grace M. Haskins, and Bessie Helstrom are some of the younger painters of flowers who are showing good work.
Miss Anna Lynch is one of our finest miniature painters, but her wonderful ability in painting flowers compels classing her also as a most successful artist in this charming branch of art.
There is a large number of good artists painting most attractive flowers, but space compels mention of only a limited number.
Anna Airy is an English painter of fruit and flowers, not for mere effect of color, but for the intrinsic value of detail. A single flower, a spray of leaves with fruit or blossom, is a thing of beauty from her drawing board or easel.
A cluster of May flowers, or hawthorn, painted natural size, impresses one as a new beauty in this world of infinite beauties. She works mostly with water colors. A spray with three or four plums and a few leaves, worm-bitten and half-curled, she called "War Time." You look and ask why? Wasps are making war on the plums; two wasps are sucking from a hole they bored in the skin. So perfectly are they drawn, the work reminds one of the microscopic painting of the Dutch masters. You discover part of the body and wing and stinger of another wasp getting his fill from the other side of the plum. A mosquito is caught in an almost invisible net of a tiny spider.
Her flowers are painted with exquisite care and color, with never a hard stroke. They are soft enough for the wind to move them—a strong contrast to the majority of pigment flowers.
People who have lived long enough to have a memory of their grandmother's gardens would "simply love" "The Flowers From a New England Garden," as massed in an old-fashioned vase, and painted by Laura D. S. Ladd. Painted so you can call them by name: double and single peonies, poppies, larkspur, fox-glove, clove pinks and phlox—you can almost catch their fragrance.
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