WOMAN IN ART
mers ago, the writer halted before the beauty of a vine-clad home embowered amid flowering shrubs and beds of bloom. It was the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Lamb.
Some of Mrs. Lamb's most important commissions, in conjunction with her husband, are the mosaics in Sage Memorial Chapel at Cornell University, and in the Chapel at Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis; also in the Governor Flower Library in Watertown, New York.
"In my case," said Mrs. Lamb, "art has been in conjunction with housekeeping and raising a family of four children. So I come back to where I began: a hard training while young, to insure speed, facility, and knowledge when time, later on, is more precious; also the careful preservation of health, without which, all else is useless."
Ella Conde Lamb is a member of the Society of Mural Painters; of the Washington Art Club; of the National Art Crafts; she was awarded the Dodge Prize, 1889, at National Academy of Design, New York; honorable mention at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; at the Atlanta Exposition, 1895; and at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. To the above citations should be added numerous portraits from her studio, and a large number of murals and interesting windows here and there throughout the states.
As we look down the vista of the ages, mural painting has, indeed, seemed a measuring rod of human progress. The walls of Egypt, Persia, and Assyria, overlapping in the dim distance, depict our background. According to fragmented walls that remain, Greece and Rome add another aeon. The Middle Ages, like a dark valley, intervene, out of which emerges the dawn of the Renaissance, another epoch reaching to its fifteenth century height in our middle distance. Next a plateau in time, whereon we discern terrestrial warfare and struggle after land and learning, science and discovery, and walls of cathedral beauty pointing heavenward with spire and tower.
From an Island shore tidal waters wafted to westward a fragile boat laden with progress, independence, and "Liberty Spiritual." Three hundred years have come and gone, bringing seed time and harvest, seed time and harvest for the bread that perishes, and the principles that can never die.
Here we find ourselves in the foreground of the vision. It is up-to-date; we are not dealing with the future, but preparing for it.
Artists, men or women, do not appear on the arena suddenly cap-a-pie, palette and brushes in hand, awaiting an order, but the years roll by, the preparation is accomplished, and the order comes.
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