Women Artists

Emily Eastman

Date: c. 1820–30

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.51

Text Entries: During the 1820s-1830s, Emily Eastman, of Louden, New Hampshire, painted watercolor portraits adapted from prints. The flattened design of Young Woman with Flowers in Her Hair-the boldly arched eyebrows, porcelain-like, expressionless face and the corkscrew curls of her hair-is an accomplished yet stylized characterization. There were few women itinerant artists active in the nineteenth century. Ladies' journals such as the popular Domestic Duties, by Frances Byerly Parke, encouraged drawing as an "appropriate morning activity" for middle-class women desiring refinement.

Elizabeth Nourse

Date: 1927

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.101

Text Entries: Flower Market at Notre Dame and Rue d'Assais are intimate, evocative treatments of scenes that would have been quite familiar to Elizabeth Nourse, who made Paris her home for half a century. Between her arrival in France in 1887 and the First World War, Nourse traveled extensively across Europe in search of subjects for the peasant scenes - in particular, images of peasant women about their domestic tasks - for which she is best known. In 1924 she retired from a career filled with accolades from the art establishment both in France and the United States, and began to paint only for her own pleasure, maintaining the impressionistic style she had developed as a young, academically-trained expatriate artist from Cincinnati. Remarkably, she supported herself and her unmarried sister Louise through the sale of her art for the duration of their adult lives.

Elizabeth Nourse

Date: 1929

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.103

Text Entries: Flower Market at Notre Dame and Rue d'Assais are intimate, evocative treatments of scenes that would have been quite familiar to Elizabeth Nourse, who made Paris her home for half a century. Between her arrival in France in 1887 and the First World War, Nourse traveled extensively across Europe in search of subjects for the peasant scenes - in particular, images of peasant women about their domestic tasks - for which she is best known. In 1924 she retired from a career filled with accolades from the art establishment both in France and the United States, and began to paint only for her own pleasure, maintaining the impressionistic style she had developed as a young, academically-trained expatriate artist from Cincinnati. Remarkably, she supported herself and her unmarried sister Louise through the sale of her art for the duration of their adult lives.

Florence Vincent Robinson

Date: c. 1930

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift in memory of Margaret Reynolds and Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood

Object number: 2003.1

Text Entries: Florence Robinson's watercolor offers a modest glimpse of part of a building along a quiet street. The upper story windows are shuttered against the bright sun; below, at street level, three doorways of varying heights, one partly sheltered by the drooping fabric of a retracted awning, also present a closed face to the outside. The façade is further varied by shadows cast by tall unseen buildings, suggesting a confined urban setting. The view terminates at the far right just past the corner of the building, beyond which two other tall structures are joined by a closed gate, with a bit of trees and blue sky hinting at a more expansive view beyond. Near the corner, the sketchy figures of a woman and a small child in white provide the only touches of animate life. Robinson's composition, with its cropped buildings and random shadows, seems as casual as her subject.<br><br> This delicate image is said to portray a scene in the Midi region of France, perhaps in the city of Toulon, and to have been made sometime between 1929 and 1931. Robinson spent those years in the resort town of Menton, some 165 kilometers from Toulon. The picturesque region, along with locales in Spain and Italy, furnished many subjects for her watercolor views. Robinson was one of many American artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who sought out scenes emblematic of the qualities their compatriots admired in European towns and cities in comparison with their own: an unhurried pace of life, the living presence of history in the tangible form of streets, buildings, and monuments, and a graciously human sense of scale. Robinson's view captures all these qualities with straightforward naturalism and an eye for local detail.