WOMAN IN ART
All this is told by Miss Holden with freedom and vigor in her murals. From her hands Cheiron the Centaur has emerged with wisdom and kindness in his bearing, and Asklepios becomes a Greek god.
The first of the series of four panels is already in place, and the second is nearly finished. Asklepios wears orange draperies which contrast finely with the blue sky and deep green cypress background. A youth in leopard skins stands at the left of Apollo's great son, Asklepios. The murals have a beautiful setting in the warm-toned walls. The third panel represents Machaon, his surgeon son, ministering to the wounded Menelaus, and the fourth is the deification of the first physician.
Cora Millet Holden is of New England stock, although her birthplace was Alexandria, Virginia, in 1895. She is the only artist of the family, and it is singular that she is not a doctor, with her grandmother, grandfather and her mother all physicians; but art was in the family and has already spoken twice, Frank D. Millet having spoken first in this generation.
Cora Holden is a mural painter and a portrait painter, many of the latter being in Boston and Cleveland. She has some bewitching portraits of children to her credit, and of adults her art has produced fine characterizations.
She studied with Joseph De Camp and Cyrus Dallin, and graduated from Massachusetts School of Art, where she has been teaching. She also spent a year in special study abroad and in travel. While in Paris she received the commission for the murals now under way, and made the figure studies from models there. The four murals are the gift of Mrs. Walter H. Merriam as a memorial to her husband, the late Dr. Merriam.
Cora Holden is a pioneer in this part of the country, as an artist of her sex who undertakes and carries through handsomely big strong mural paintings of a nature long considered only for men, and she certainly scores heavily in the hall of the splendid new Allen Library of Western Reserve University.
Jessie Arms Botke is a mid-west artist by birth. She was a student at the Chicago Art Institute and did some of her best work in that city. Her painting is decorative in style and is a very natural combination of the feather creation and flowers. Both are subjects requiring careful study and technique, and Mrs. Botke has given a full meed of study to each. A corner of an old-fashioned garden on some of her canvases is as refreshing as if one had stepped into her grandmother's garden of long ago. She uses colors
202
