WOMAN IN ART
This might be the Madonna and her Son; it may be the interpretation of the universal spirit of motherhood. Miss Walker does not say. Yet to many minds it seems to relate itself to that day when Mary found the Child in the temple. There is a questioning in the mother's face, a wondering over the revelation of the Child's new-found wisdom; an awe as she realizes His high destiny. And the boy seems to be seeing visions with his clear eyes, seems to be putting aside the mother's hand, as He steps forth to begin His "Father's business."
Nellie Walker has accomplished some worthwhile sculptured reliefs. In the State House at Springfield, Illinois, is a bronze tablet commemorating the Illinois soldiers of the War of 1812. It depicts a young frontiersman in the costume of his day, fringed buckskin shirt and trousers and coonskin cap with the tail down his back, and with his powder horn and long rifle. Sketched lightly in the background is the picture of old Fort Dearborn, surrounded by its stockade, with its blockhouse at the corner. The romance and hardihood of the frontier days is vividly suggested.
Two huge reliefs carved in the marble facade of the new library of the Iowa State College at Ames had their problems for the artist which she mastered with skill.
Miss Walker is one of the three Chicago members of the National Sculpture Society, also a member of the Association of Chicago Painters and Sculptors, and of the now defunct Society of Western Artists. The Cordon Club, composed of women prominent in the professions and arts, elected her president, which position she held for three years. She is a member of the Daughters of 1812 (who were responsible for the bronze tablet in the State House at Springfield), also a Daughter of the American Revolution.
Miss Walker has other qualities by gift of nature that have combined with her early desire to cut stone, and her splendid training in technique with such a master as Lorado Taft. She has drawn on her versatile imagination for subject and composition, and then, with a directness of attack, has put vital feeling into her material, a vitality and will that supplements the will to work and produces the power we call individuality, and which forecasts even greater development for the future of her art.
For some years the art world has enjoyed the sculptural work of Anna Vaughn Hyatt. Be the work small or large, lovers of art have not only enjoyed the creations of her thought and hand, but have experienced a real interest in the development of that thought, that technique, till now, if a
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