Just Another Marble Carver

Ugolino and His Sons, Marble, Modeled by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Carved by Victor Bernard, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I think it’s appropriate at this time to sing the praises of the marble carver Victor Bernard.  His presumed masterpiece, the magnificent, majestic, anguished depiction of Ugolino and His Sons, is currently the centerpiece of a breathtaking sculpture exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Ugolino is an incredible figural composition in marble, and for years in my former job as a part-time Information Desk lackey for the Met I effusively praised its remarkable qualities to visitors.  How, I wondered, could one man seamlessly carve such precise, intricate, anatomical detail for five intertwined figures from one block of marble without any discernible slip of the chisel?

Not much is known about Mr. Bernard, apparently.  But everybody knows this sculpture depicting Ugolino and His Sons from Dante’s Inferno.  The tyrant Ugolino is condemned to eternal punishment with his four sons and faces the agonizing choice of either starvation or cannibalism.   One reason nobody knows much about Bernard is all the credit for carving Ugolino is usually given to the wrong man!  I’ve long thought that this incredible masterpiece of marble carving was the work of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), whose sculptures and related artwork are on view in a spectacular exhibit at the Met through May 26. 

Carpeaux is considered the greatest 19th Century sculptor before Rodin.  And while Carpeaux did all the critical studies and clay and plaster models for Ugolino and His Sons from 1960-61, the marble version was carved by Bernard from 1865-67.  Judging by this one incredible example, Bernard was an extraordinary marble carver.  He is briefly referenced in the catalog accompanying the current exhibition, “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux,” co-authored by James David Draper, the Met’s curator for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Edouard Papet, chief curator of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.  There might be more information on Bernard buried in some archaic French publication in a massive PDF file that takes forever to download, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking for it.  I did do a little Google research, but came up empty-handed.

The bronze version of Ugolino was placed in the Tuileries Garden in Paris in 1863.  In 1865, Stephane Derville, a Parisian marble carver, proposed creating a marble version.  “The carving in an off-white marble from Saint-Beat, a quarry in the Pyrenees that belonged to Derville, was to be executed by Victor Bernard, as stipulated by the contract that was drawn up in Paris on December 23, 1865,” Papet writes.  So there you have it, or as much as you are likely to have about it.  Bernard gets a brief mention on the Met’s own website in a description of its Ugolino:  “This marble version was executed by the practitioner Bernard under Carpeaux's supervision and completed in time for the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1867. The date inscribed on the marble [1860] refers to the original plaster model's completion.”  Derville’s family retained possession of the marble Ugolino until 1950.  The Met purchased it in 1967 from the Wildenstein Gallery.

The Met probably doesn’t want to make too much of the fact that its masterpiece was carved not by the great man himself but by a barely acknowledged skilled craftsman named Victor Bernard.  In fact, in promoting the Carpeaux exhibit of 150 sculptures, paintings, and drawings in nine galleries, the Met has this to say about Carpeaux:  “He strove for anatomical realism in all media, but especially in his marble sculptures and busts, which seem to capture flesh and blood in stone.”  Well, yes they do, to an incredible degree, despite not being carved personally by Carpeaux.   The soft, off-white beauty of the marble perfectly mimics the translucence of pulsating human flesh in a miraculous way.  I couldn’t believe the sense of  life emanating from those marbles.  I stared long and hard at several of the portrait busts, including the handsome marble likeness of one of the 19th Century’s greatest academic painters, Jean-Leon Gerome.

Jeon-Leon Gerome, Marble, Getty Museum

Carpeaux, who died of bladder cancer when he was only 48, was the son of a stone mason and himself a skilled carver in marble when he was young, but after nearly going blind from an infection caused by marble dust, he created his greatest works without actually carving another block of stone.

Having belatedly learned this startling news about the creation of the Met’s Ugolino, I was extremely disappointed, even a bit despondent, over the fact that Carpeaux himself had not carved what I have always considered to be the most impressive sculpture at the Met.   I was cruelly reminded that things we value in life are "seldom what they seem."

Making a clay or plaster model of Ugolino is one thing.  But carving a huge block of marble to reveal five intertwined figures to anatomical perfection always seemed one heck of a lot harder.  But what do I know about hard work.  I’m only an easel painter.  Painting an apple seems like hard work to me.  I couldn’t contemplate the seemingly insurmountable task of carving Ugolino and His Sons.  So I did a little Internet searching  and found that it’s not quite as hard as it looks, and farming out the work to apprentices or skilled stonemasons was common practice among most of the big name sculptors like Rodin, and dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks.  The self-hewn marbles of the incomparable Michelangelo, however, were on  Carpeaux’s mind for nearly every one of his own figural creations.

“With the introduction of the full-sized clay or plaster model in the Cinquecento [16th Century Italy], it had become more and more possible for the sculptor to leave the transfer from the model to stone to his apprentices,” wrote Chandler Rathfon Post, an associate professor of Greek and Fine Arts at Harvard, in his 1921 book, A History of European and American Sculpture.  “The gradual perfection of methods for such transfer, especially the invention of the pointing machine, entailed the unwelcome result that by the nineteenth century, masters had generally abandoned the practice of hewing their own statues and reliefs. Sculpture thus lost that life, warmth, and vivid impression of the artist's individuality which constitute so much of the appeal, for instance, in Michael Angelo [sic].”

In today’s digital world, stone carving can even be done by automated milling machines controlled by computer data.   Using this technology, a work in marble can be executed in about one-third the time of more traditional methods, I read somewhere.  But many of today’s sculptors still prefer to carve marble themselves and use the pointing device for accurate carving of the figure.  Here’s a link to a contemporary sculptor’s marble carving process and his thoughts on the use of surrogate carvers. http://www.jasonarkles.com/process/.

To be honest, I don’t know anything about these pointing devices for stone carving.  I’ve never been curious enough to look into them myself and have never seen how they work.   But having a skilled carver do the work for you seems to be a form of cheating, especially when the work is the one sculpture you are best known for.  After winning first place at the French Salon in 1863 for the bronze Ugolino, Carpeaux wrote to a friend, “The first step has been made: Everyone in Paris knows the name Carpeaux.”  

I wonder if Victor Bernard got due credit when Carpeaux received a first place gold medal for the marble Ugolino at the Universal Exposition in 1867?  But you know, whether he did or not, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to him.  He had steady work for a couple of years, probably got paid pretty well, and could take symbiotic pride in having worked closely with the celebrated sculptor.  I imagine the workers on Henry Ford’s first assembly line felt the same way about helping put together the Model T Ford.  There isn’t room for everybody at the top. 

Commendatore del Regno

Raffaello Sorbi (1844-1931), An Outdoor Osteria, 1892, Oil on Canvas, 19 by 31 1/2 in., Private Collection

Suppose you were as good at drawing and painting as Raffaelo Sorbi was in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  You might have been able to carve out a pretty good niche market for yourself, as he did.  Sorbi concentrated on painting small, highly detailed historical paintings of gentry and villagers playing games and relaxing together in harmony outside rustic restaurants in the sun-filled Tuscan countryside.  He was so successful and his works were so popular that he was awarded the country’s highest honor, Commendatore del Regno, or Order of the Crown of Italy.  The order has been suppressed by law since the Republic was founded in 1946.  But in Sorbi’s day, it was a very big deal. 

I am in awe of all those 19th Century genre painters from Italy, France, Germany, Spain and other European nations.  When I first started going to the auction exhibitions of 19th Century European paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the 1980s, there were literally hundreds of small genre paintings on display, each of them carefully designed and accurately drawn and painted, with lively color and brushwork, and with loads of atmosphere to boot.  It wore me out after paying close attention to the first 20 or so, and I was relieved to go to the rooms housing the work of artists who painted on canvases big enough to see some detail without putting your nose to the surface. The exquisite details these genre artists were able to paint on a very small scale is truly amazing.  What remarkable control of the medium and the brush they had.  Starting their training as kids, they drew accurately with a loaded brush.  Most of us today fill in careful drawings with thin paint or simply push the paint around until the detail looks almost as good as a photograph.

I came across the painting reproduced above in a 1988 Sotheby’s London auction catalog I added to my huge collection a few years ago.  What a perfect example of genre painting it is.  Sorbi has covered his small canvas, only 19 by 31½ in., with eye-catching detail from north to south and from east to west, leading the viewer on a relaxing, casual stroll through his vivacious and charming 18th Century mise en scene.  The placement of the central figures and the little bits at the corners and edges of the canvas make for a very pleasant visual entertainment.  The balance of all the elements in this painting is outstanding.

Little did I know Sorbi had done dozens of similar paintings with a dependable cast of characters that he used interchangeably for these outdoor café scenes, most featuring an attractive waitress standing in a prominent location, with the action swirling all around.  Sorbi’s romantically nostalgic paintings depicting good times in the beautiful Tuscan countryside of 18th Century Italy are said to have appealed to the 19th Century Italian reunification wish for all social classes to live in harmony.  Sorbi made a very good living selling his work through important picture dealers in Paris, London, Munich and Berlin.

The brilliant, sun-dappled effects in Sorbi’s paintings indicate his affinity for the Macchiaioli plein air movement that developed in his native Tuscany in the mid-19th century as an antidote to the studio paintings of the academics.  The Macchiaioli artists focused their attention on nature by recording the effects of light, shadow and atmosphere in their paintings, while often commenting on current socio-political topics.

Sorbi was born in Florence in 1844 and died there in 1931.  He studied design and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he was heavily influenced by Antonio Ciseri (1821-1891), a painter of portraits and historical subjects.  Before turning to depictions of an idyllic 18th Century rural Italy, he painted a number of classical subjects inspired by Pompeii, the ruins of which were a popular stop on the Grand Tour.

Pompeian Scene, 1879, Oil on Canvas, 14 3/8 x 16 11/32 in., Private Collection

The Huntsmen´s Lunch, 1922, oil on canvas 23½ x 39¼ in., private collection

A Game of Morra, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 23.9 x 31.5 in., Private Collection

A Sunlit Osteria, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 24 x 34.1 in., Private Collection

Stopping for a Drink, 1888, Oil on Canvas, 20 x 18 1/4 in., Private Collection

 

The Chess Players,1886, Oil on Canvas, 20½ x 28¼ in., Private Collection

A Game of Leapfrog, 1887, Oil on Canvas, 16.1 x 29.1 in., Private Collection

Feeding the Ducks and Turkeys, 1924, Oil on Canvas, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 in., Private Collection

 

Marie Egner's Notebooks

Marie Egner, Self-Portrait, 1878

I had a part-time job for a couple of years typing correspondence and financial reports for a money management firm in midtown whose clients included some well-known figures in the entertainment industry.  Like all the part-time jobs I was able to land over the years, it enabled me to preserve my professional standing as a world-class starving artist.

Working only 15 to 20 hours a week, I was able to paint mornings in my west/northwest-facing home studio, when the daylight is the most consistent, and sketch the figure at the nearby Art Students League in the late afternoon life drawing class, which is free for members.

The job was pretty painless and sometimes enjoyable.  I remember listening to my boss, the firm’s lead lawyer, counseling in a friendly, fatherly tone a tall, beautiful, 18-year-old fashion model, newly arrived from South Africa and with money to burn.  He urged her to economize by taking the subway instead of taxis to and from assignments.   Very good advice, I thought to myself. 

I don’t like to name drop, of course, but the clients included a performer who made a fortune singing a beer commercial, a famous magician duo, a writer who created an infamous fictional serial killer, and assorted heirs to show business fortunes.  Money has never interested me much, so I paid little attention to their assets when I typed their financial reports.

So why is this little part-time job of mine, working for a firm that epitomizes the pursuit of mammon, insinuating itself into this ostensibly art-related blog?  Well, it’s because it led in April of 1986 to my discovery of the greatest story of all the great stories I’ve eagerly devoured about painters living the artist’s life with all the breath that’s in them.

The Austrian Institute was just around the corner from my employer’s offices, and I stopped by around noontime one day to view an exhibit of paintings created by an artist I had never heard of before, an Austrian Impressionist named Marie Egner (1850-1940).

Marie Egner was a terrific painter -- a single woman who courageously traversed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th Century, producing landscapes in watercolor, gouache and oils with equal facility.  On many of her painting excursions she was accompanied by one or more of her painting teachers and compatriots.  Later on in her career, she specialized in creating lush floral still lifes, which were a particular hit with collectors, including Austrian royalty. 

Here’s some biographical information about Ms. Egner from an Internet website.  If you are like me, it lists a lot of painters you’ve probably never heard of before.  The 19th Century was loaded with real painters, not part-time typists:

From 1867 to 1872, Marie Egner was a disciple of Hermann von Königsbrunn in Graz.  From 1872 to 1874, Carl Jungheim was her teacher at the Academy of Düsseldorf. There she met Hugo Darnaut who was to become a life-long friend. In 1881 she was admitted to the circle of painters around Emil-Jakob Schindler, who was her teacher until 1888. Together with Schindler's disciples Carl Moll and Olga Wisinger-Florian, Egner stayed several summers at Schindler's property Schloss Plankenberg. The artists worked together in a very intensive and fruitful way. Schindler plays an important part in the woman's artistic as well as private life.

In 1882, her painting "Lombardische Dorfstraße" was shown in the Vienna Künstlerhaus. She also exhibited at the Royal Academy in London (1888), at the Berliner Kunstausstellung (1898) and at the world exposition in Paris (1900). From 1887 on she was in charge of a painting school in England. She was a member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists. http://www.austrian-paintings.at/marie-egner-en/

What struck me the most about this wonderful painter, though, was not her artwork, good as it is, but the fact that this outwardly reserved woman jotted down her deepest and most passionate thoughts about art, music and politics in notebook diaries she secretly kept for 70 years, ending in indecipherable scribbles when she was nearly blind only a couple of years before her death at the age of 90.

 

When I started studying painting on a serious level – already in my 30s, I got hit pretty hard by the sense that this was what I should have been doing with my life all along.  I jotted down a few ardent observations about my new life in a little memo pad for about two months, and that was the end of that.  What Ms. Egner managed to do for so many years is simply incredible.

She eloquently expressed her deepest feelings in the unfettered privacy of a secret garden that she needed to cultivate all by herself and on her own terms.  I know from my own dreamy life experience that Ms. Egner’s notebook diaries satisfied so completely that basic human desire to be honest and true in the only place that really matters ultimately – our own cloistered minds.  As someone whose public pronouncements are ill-formed and completely ignored by those around me, I can so easily identify with the Emily Dickinsons and the Marie Egners of the world.

In a booklet prepared for that Austrian Institute exhibit, Martin Suppan, author of the artist’s monograph, notes that Ms. Egner refers in one of her diaries to her teacher von Konigsbrunn as an “antiquated dusty relic,” who turned her into a “nature fanatic.”   She calls Carl Jungheim “Charley” and writes that she does not want to become a “Charley-like-working-machine.”  As for Schindler, she was very attracted to him for his “imagination, playfulness – balancing above the abyss” and for his “drastic poetic talent.” She credits Schindler’s praise and criticism with providing the “passionate stimulus” lacking thus far in her work.   In London she meets the Glasgow-born watercolorist Robert Weir Allan, who influenced her to change from her “petty Viennese way of coloring to a lively, smooth technique.”

Martin Suppan writes that Ms. Egner “knows very well to tell the difference between creative expression and stylish fashion.”  She severely criticizes one of her young colleagues who “showed me her studies and this very talented girl also makes this nonsense with red specks and green, red-yellow-trimmed trees.  She claims to see it that way – she should really see her ophthalmologist – it is never true – nothing but affectation and sensationalism.”

Ms. Egner begins her last legible diary entry, at the age of 87, with the words, “Whence, whither, wherefore…should be written on tombstones.”  Mr. Suppan observes, “These last questions were posed before her final blindness.  Soon afterwards, her writing becomes illegible; the lines are running into each other.”

In one of her late diary entries, Ms. Egner crafted the most heartfelt affirmation I have ever come across for why the greatest and the least of us still bother to continue painting from nature in this digital age.

After viewing her works in a Viennese exhibit in 1935, Marie Egner, 85 years old, plagued with cataracts and sometimes in despair, wrote:  “When I worked on these paintings I really lived and was happy, sometimes high up in the skies like lovers, sometimes mortally grieved.  I happened to live through plenty, indeed plenty of genuine things in my life.”

Although many of us are forced to temporarily sling hash, usher for theaters and concert halls, drive taxis, bartend, work in construction or type financial reports, we understand you very well, Ms. Egner, we’ve been there ourselves on the same roller coaster ride for a few glorious, fleeting moments.

Thick or Thin

John Singer Sargent, Violet Sargent, his youngest sister, 1881, Oil on Canvas

 27.5 x 22 in., Private Collection

John Singer Sargent, Rose-Marie Ormond, the artist's niece, 1912, Oil on Canvas, 31 ½ x 23 in., Private Collection

John Singer Sargent, Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice, 1913, Oil on Canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

John Singer Sargent, Trout Stream in the Tyrol, 1914, Oil on Canvas, 22 x 28 in., Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco

I’ve always thought there was something second rate about many realist oil painters who paint thinly.  You might as well paint with watercolors if you don’t care about the exciting physicality of the oil medium.  I think the reason why John Singer Sargent stands atop the list of bravura portrait painters is because he wasn’t afraid to paint with a “fully loaded brush.”  Of course, you have to draw as well as Sargent to really pull it off.  But we can dream, can’t we?   Sargent was such a wizard with the brush that even his watercolors have the full-bodied look of oils. 

Whenever I’m painting, some of Sargent’s words to a student pop into my head.  One time he said, “The thicker you paint, the more color flows.”  And he always tells me when I’m painting glassware that, “If you see a thing transparent, paint it transparent; don't get the effect by a thin stain showing the canvas through. That's a mere trick.”  

 

Hendrick Ter Brugghen (1588-1629), A Jovial Violinist Holding a Glass of Wine (circa 1627), Oil on Canvas, 41 ¾ by 33 7/8 in., Private Collection

And while I’m painting, that admonition sets me to thinking of all those paintings of glassware we’ve seen where the vessel is merely indicated over a dark background by strokes of lighter paint to indicate the rim and base, and a crisp window highlight.  You know it’s a drinking glass, but you don’t get the weight of the glass in space by doing it that way.  You have to observe and interpret the three-dimensional form of the glass and the volume of whatever liquid it contains, if any, by accurately representing the variety of tones that distinguish the object from the background color.

There are probably dozens of other considerations that go through my head as I push the paint back and forth between a drinking glass and the background to get the glass to seem as real as it actually is in the atmospheric space in front of me.  I dislike discussing lost and found edges.  They are such an obvious cliché for most realist painters.  So is the observation that there are no lines in nature.  Both are very important considerations, however, when attempting to achieve the illusion of reality on canvas.  But if they are exaggerated, or manufactured by the artist, it looks like a gimmick and the illusion of reality is lost.

Richard Schmid’s people do a lot of that lost and found kind of painting today.  They get some punchy, high-keyed, decorative paintings with that technique.  Collectors and many painters seem to love their work.  You don’t see any real truth to nature in that approach.   But I guess many artists and art lovers today think creating an alternate universe is more important than being true to nature.  I’d say, “to each his own,” but I don’t really believe that when it comes to contemporary realism.  There’s still enough beauty of form and color to be found in nature with your own eyes, without resorting to stylistic gimmicks that are eagerly passed around from painter to painter.   Impressionists and expressionists can do whatever they want, as far as I’m concerned, to make an exciting painting.  And I love a lot of different styles of representational art, just not obvious brush-handling gimmicks exploited by their creators for whatever their reasons might be.  I personally can’t fathom why one painter would want another painter to handle the paint just like he does -- in his own peculiar but effective way, that is.   But I guess you can’t write instruction books, create videos and lead workshops without selling a bit of your soul in the process.

When I started painting and saw Sargent's work for the first time,  I was bowled over by the way he handled his edges.  The background tones might have been almost identical to the foreground object, but the subtle separation was often obtained by a solid stroke of a slightly different tone, whether it was a sitter’s cheek or a Venetian column.  The effect from a distance was a palpable realism.

Today’s “lost and found” edge painters owe a great debt to Anders Zorn, a much earthier human being than Sargent, who creates the same palpable realism on canvas over a wider range of figurative subjects with a comparable bravura technique in both oils and watercolors, without using a lot of paint to get the job done.   Some of his incredibly well-modeled female nudes seem to be merely stained with gorgeous flesh color, but the modeling of the form is still perfection itself.

Zorn’s female nudes are unmatched in the history of painting for their naturalistic, physical presence.  He seems to have done hundreds in his lifetime, the envy of all figurative painters, to be sure.  Some earlier painters, like Rubens, Boucher and Fragonard, for example, give him a good run for his money.  But we know that the charming nudes created by those earlier painters were a few steps removed from reality.  Not so with Zorn’s nudes -- front, back, sideways, horizontal, bending over, reclining or whatever.   Just between you and me, nobody ever painted more naturalistic, volumetric female derrieres than the great Swede.

Anders Zorn, One of his Swedish Sauna Paintings

While Zorn quite obviously delighted in painting the female form divine, I’m saddled with painting drinking glasses.  My mind races around with thoughts on painting as I continue slogging away, trying to get my drinking glass to seem every bit as real as a Zorn painting of a derriere.  “What a revoltin’ Development!”  When it’s all over, I forget everything until I paint another picture with a drinking glass in the setup.  And all I’ve painted is one damn drinking glass.  Now I’ve got all the other stuff in the still life setup to paint in order to bring them up to some degree of finish in harmony with that one glass.  In addition, I’m obliged to continue my incidental musings about all the encounters I’ve had with all the fascinating thoughts and daunting images from all the other great painters I admire.

A painter’s life isn’t easy, especially if you are hearing voices and following Sargent’s commandments!

William Orpen, The Studio, 1910, Oil on Canvas, 38 x 31.5 in.

Leeds Museums and Galleries, UK

But I have to let the great Irish master Sir William Orpen have the last word on thick or thin painting.  Like Sargent and other terrific painters in those days, Orpen didn’t seem to have much interest in talking about technique.  Those painters all learned a way to paint and that was that.   According to his devoted student Sean Keating, a wonderful Irish painter in his own right, “Orpen taught that sufficient paint to create the illusion of light and shade, of tone and color was enough.”  Keating said Orpen laughed at talk about “touch,” “impasto,” and other paint-handling techniques, calling it, “all that sort of tosh.”

When I came across that quote a couple of years ago, I was set free from the oppression of Sargent’s words.  Unfortunately, this freedom only lasts until I stand once more in front of a Sargent painting.  Then I start to dream again.

Rambling Around the Red Rose Girls

William A. Bouguereau and his Women's Class, late 1890s

Women's Life Class at the Chase School of Art, New York, 1896

What happened to all those women who studied art at the academies in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries? It seems that many just faded out of sight for one reason or another; their art legacies sealed in a trunk and stashed away in a relative’s attic for many years before finally being excavated.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Such was the case with Edith Lake Wilkinson, a gifted artist who was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1868 and died in a mental hospital in 1957 at the age of 89, having spent the last 32 years of her life incarcerated for “depression.”  Seven years before she died, she was evaluated by one W.B. Rogers, M.D., in the following manner:  “Patient is quiet on the ward. Makes her own bed. Talks to herself and has numerous unusual ideas. In fact, everything she says is unusual. She is very talkative and imagines everything. Her physical condition is good but there is no improvement in her mental condition.”   That sounds an awful lot like me on one of my better days.  Back then, a little depression exhibited by women was cause for great alarm among family members, and often meant hospitalization and shock treatments that caused far more harm than good, as they did in my own sensitive mother’s case.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Wilkinson studied with Kenyon Cox, J. Carroll Beckwith and William Merritt Chase at The Art Students League in the 1890s and returned later in the early 20th Century to study with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the League and Charles Webster Hawthorne in Provincetown, where she adopted elements of her mentor’s fresh, high-key style before she evidently stopped painting after landing in a mental institution for the rest of her life.  She clearly learned quite a bit about painting from all those great instructors.  Belying her presumed mental condition, her highly accomplished, modernist works are filled with light and life.  They are bright and cheerful across a wide range of genres -- figures, landscapes, townscapes and still lifes.

Edith’s story is chronicled in fascinating detail by Jane Anderson, an Emmy award-winning writer and filmmaker, who created a website to honor her great-aunt:  http://www.edithlakewilkinson.com.  It was Anderson’s mother who had opened a couple of trunks in her brother-in-law’s attic in the 1960s to unearth their talented relative, whose last years seem to have been such a pathetic waste of a joyful, creative spirit. Anderson grew up with her great-aunt’s work on the walls and was inspired to make art herself.  Following Edith’s example, she took classes at the Art Students League and always carries a sketchbook with her on her travels.   Her sketches seem to have the spirit of her great-aunt’s sketches.

Like a lot of single women artists in those days, Edith Lake Wilkinson had a long relationship with another woman.  It’s often not clear whether all those relationships that women artists forged with other women were sexual in nature or just a result of the natural human desire for companionship to weather life’s ups and downs.  No doubt for some serious women artists, it was a way to stay on course without having men around to muck things up.

Elizabeth Shippen Green

Jessie Willcox Smith

Violet Oakley, Penn's Vision is part of the series of thirteen murals Oakley painted for the Governor's Reception Room in the Pennsylvania State Capitol.

Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens in their Chestnut Street studio, ca. 1901

Anderson speculates that Edith might have been acquainted with the most famous of the lot, the extraordinary Red Rose Girls, illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) and Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954), and muralist Violet Oakley (1874-1961).  In 1899, those three artists took over the Red Rose Inn, a picturesque old estate on Philadelphia's Main Line, and vowed to live together forever and never marry.  They created art on their own terms in an environment of mutual inspiration, until Elizabeth Shippen surprised her comrades by getting married in 1911.  But Smith and Oakley remained true to their original objective and all three women continued to create marvelous art throughout their careers. 

Historical data and the way things were back then tell us it was pretty tough for women to juggle both a painting career and the demands placed on them by society to be housewives and mothers.  In those days, you couldn’t just copy a photograph while sitting at a kitchen table, sell it on the Internet and call yourself an artist.  You had to undergo rigorous academic training first to be taken seriously as a professional artist.  It was hard sledding for those women who kept at it. 

Every state in the union probably had a handful of strong-willed women artists who returned home after their academic studies to persevere against all odds and take a vital role in shaping the cultural life of their communities.

Elsa Jemne, The Chinese Screen, ca. 1924

Daniel Garber (1880-1958), Portrait of Elsa Laubach, ca.1912, Charcoal on Paper, 21 1/2 x 15 ¼ in.

Elsa Laubach Jemne, for example, was one of eight newly celebrated women artists who blazed a trail for art and culture in their home state of Minnesota in the early 20th Century.  Only four of the artists married and only Jemne and the portrait artist Frances Cranmer Greenman (1890-1981) had children.  

 

Frances Cranmer Greenman and Mary Pickford in front of Greenman’s Portrait of the Actress, 1935, eBay, Hyee Auctions

All eight artists supported themselves, often with art-related jobs they hated, but which they stuck with out of necessity. While in art school, Elsa did commercial art, which she described in her diary as "stupid, uncongenial, & maddening in its monotony."  

Elsa Laubach Jemne at her Easel, 1922

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1888, Elsa studied out East with two of my favorite painters, the still life painter Soren Emil Carlson at The Art Students League and Daniel Garber at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was enrolled from 1912 to 1915.  Said to be one of Garber’s favorite students, she was a recipient of the Academy’s Emlin T. Cresson Award, which enabled her to travel to Italy in 1914, where she chose to focus her studies on fresco painting. World War I erupted and she had to return to America.  She went on to a successful career as a portraitist, landscape painter, muralist and illustrator in her home state under her married name, Elsa Jemne.  She achieved her greatest recognition for her many New Deal murals, which were executed in places such as the Hutchinson Post Office, the Stearns County Courthouse, and the Minneapolis Armory.

Elsa Jemne, Iron-Ore Mines Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office

Elsa Jemne, Wilderness Mural, Tempera, Ely, MN Post Office

Rejecting commercial art work, Elsa toted her painting supplies on Greyhound buses all over the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota during the Great Depression to create murals depicting local or regional themes. Sometimes she had to wait for the plaster to dry on the wall before she could begin her murals in tempera. She occupied her down time painting watercolors of the wilderness surrounding the communities.   She loved creating those murals and took great pride in them.  And her work must have been a lifesaver for her family, as well, because her husband’s architecture practice had dried up during the 1930s.

As an important Minnesota artist, Elsa Jemne was an inspiration to other women, and helped found the St. Paul Women's City Club to promote women's rights. She died in St. Paul in 1974 at the age of 86.

There is a wonderful account of Jemne’s work on a mural for the Post Office in Ely, Minnesota in 1940 written by Irene Grahek for The Ely Echo weekly newspaper: http://bit.ly/190YiWJ.  Grahek’s niece is married to Jemne’s grandson, and they provided details for her story.  When the Post Office mural was finished and the scaffolding came down, Elsa finally saw what she had accomplished and said, “I think it is good.” 

Of all those unrecognized women art students in days gone by, the two who abducted this little ramble of mine, Elsa Laubach Jemne and Edith Lake Wilkinson, had nothing in common, it seems, other than very similar academic art backgrounds.  Elsa was determined to make a living as an artist, and she succeeded.  We’re not sure about Edith's motivation.  Some artists are just more interested in making art than selling it.  I think Edith was like that.  But if you don’t sell your art, what’s the point of making it? Thinking like that can be pretty depressing for any serious artist, let me tell you.