Women Artists

Frances Hammell Gearhart

Date: 1929

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

Object number: 1996.21

Text Entries: Frances Hammell Gearhart is best known for her nuanced woodblock and watercolor depictions of the California landscape, for which she developed a lifelong love following her father, a beekeeper, on his honey-gathering treks near Pasadena. She was the oldest of three unmarried sisters, all of whom taught in the Los Angeles public schools and later became proficient in the art of woodblock prints; Frances first exhibited her work when she was forty-two years old. She was the only one of the three sisters who did not study with Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), the influential painter, printmaker and teacher whose book Composition of 1899 cultivated widespread interest in this country in abstract principles of design, especially those of traditional Japanese art. Nevertheless, her spare and atmospheric woodblock prints, suffused with the delicate colors of Japanese prints, reveal a deep appreciation for Dow's teachings.

Frances Hammell Gearhart

Date: 1936–37

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

Object number: 1996.22

Text Entries: Frances Hammell Gearhart is best known for her nuanced woodblock and watercolor depictions of the California landscape, for which she developed a lifelong love following her father, a beekeeper, on his honey-gathering treks near Pasadena. She was the oldest of three unmarried sisters, all of whom taught in the Los Angeles public schools and later became proficient in the art of woodblock prints; Frances first exhibited her work when she was forty-two years old. She was the only one of the three sisters who did not study with Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), the influential painter, printmaker and teacher whose book Composition of 1899 cultivated widespread interest in this country in abstract principles of design, especially those of traditional Japanese art. Nevertheless, her spare and atmospheric woodblock prints, suffused with the delicate colors of Japanese prints, reveal a deep appreciation for Dow's teachings.

Helen Hyde

Date: 1905

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

Object number: 1996.24

Text Entries: Helen Hyde was one of thousands of young American art students in France between 1891 and 1894, the height of popular enthusiasm for Japanese art and culture. She saw Mary Cassatt's Japanese-inspired prints of mothers and children while in Paris, and would produce many variations on this theme in her own prints, though she never married or had children. However, Hyde differed from the majority of Western artists who experimented with Japanese woodblock prints in that she spent half of her adult life living and working in Nikko and Tokyo, Japan. While most Western artists carved their own blocks, Hyde worked exclusively according to the Japanese traditional method, in which the artist collaborates with a specially trained block cutter and printer. The subtle gradations of tone, cutting off or overlapping of forms at the frame, and bold curvilinear variety of shapes evident in The Bath and Moon Bridge at Kameido indicate Hyde's study of Japanese compositional devices. Although executed in Tokyo, Moonlight on the Viga Canal was inspired by scenes from Hyde's 1911 trip to Mexico; she wrote of the "tall, thin, French-looking trees" and "witchyfolk, heavy laden" that followed the canal's banks.

Helen Hyde

Date: 1914

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

Object number: 1996.25

Text Entries: Helen Hyde was one of thousands of young American art students in France between 1891 and 1894, the height of popular enthusiasm for Japanese art and culture. She saw Mary Cassatt's Japanese-inspired prints of mothers and children while in Paris, and would produce many variations on this theme in her own prints, though she never married or had children. However, Hyde differed from the majority of Western artists who experimented with Japanese woodblock prints in that she spent half of her adult life living and working in Nikko and Tokyo, Japan. While most Western artists carved their own blocks, Hyde worked exclusively according to the Japanese traditional method, in which the artist collaborates with a specially trained block cutter and printer. The subtle gradations of tone, cutting off or overlapping of forms at the frame, and bold curvilinear variety of shapes evident in The Bath and Moon Bridge at Kameido indicate Hyde's study of Japanese compositional devices. Although executed in Tokyo, Moonlight on the Viga Canal was inspired by scenes from Hyde's 1911 trip to Mexico; she wrote of the "tall, thin, French-looking trees" and "witchyfolk, heavy laden" that followed the canal's banks.

Helen Hyde

Date: 1912

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

Object number: 1996.26

Text Entries: Helen Hyde was one of thousands of young American art students in France between 1891 and 1894, the height of popular enthusiasm for Japanese art and culture. She saw Mary Cassatt's Japanese-inspired prints of mothers and children while in Paris, and would produce many variations on this theme in her own prints, though she never married or had children. However, Hyde differed from the majority of Western artists who experimented with Japanese woodblock prints in that she spent half of her adult life living and working in Nikko and Tokyo, Japan. While most Western artists carved their own blocks, Hyde worked exclusively according to the Japanese traditional method, in which the artist collaborates with a specially trained block cutter and printer. The subtle gradations of tone, cutting off or overlapping of forms at the frame, and bold curvilinear variety of shapes evident in The Bath and Moon Bridge at Kameido indicate Hyde's study of Japanese compositional devices. Although executed in Tokyo, Moonlight on the Viga Canal was inspired by scenes from Hyde's 1911 trip to Mexico; she wrote of the "tall, thin, French-looking trees" and "witchyfolk, heavy laden" that followed the canal's banks.

Helen Hyde

Date: 1908

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

Object number: 1996.27

Text Entries: Helen Hyde was one of thousands of young American art students in France between 1891 and 1894, the height of popular enthusiasm for Japanese art and culture. She saw Mary Cassatt's Japanese-inspired prints of mothers and children while in Paris, and would produce many variations on this theme in her own prints, though she never married or had children. However, Hyde differed from the majority of Western artists who experimented with Japanese woodblock prints in that she spent half of her adult life living and working in Nikko and Tokyo, Japan. While most Western artists carved their own blocks, Hyde worked exclusively according to the Japanese traditional method, in which the artist collaborates with a specially trained block cutter and printer. The subtle gradations of tone, cutting off or overlapping of forms at the frame, and bold curvilinear variety of shapes evident in The Bath and Moon Bridge at Kameido indicate Hyde's study of Japanese compositional devices. Although executed in Tokyo, Moonlight on the Viga Canal was inspired by scenes from Hyde's 1911 trip to Mexico; she wrote of the "tall, thin, French-looking trees" and "witchyfolk, heavy laden" that followed the canal's banks.

Blanche Lazzell

Date: 1919 (block cut), 1931 (printed)

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

Object number: 1996.32

Text Entries: Blanche Lazzell was born ninth in a family of ten children in rural West Virginia in 1878. By 1905 she had earned a remarkable three college degrees, and would continue to enjoy being a student throughout her life, both in Europe and the United States; as late as her sixties she studied abstract painting with artist and teacher Hans Hoffman. Lazzell is best known for color prints like Still Life, pulled from a single wood block, a process developed in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1915. A woodblock print executed in the traditional, Japanese-inspired manner requires a different block for each color; in contrast, the more expedient "white line technique" or "Provincetown print" utilizes a single block whose carved shapes, each colored individually, are separated by a groove that produces a white line on paper. Lazzell produced very few figurative works, concentrating instead on exploring geometric cubism and the bright coastal colors of her adopted home of Provincetown both through still lifes and landscapes.

Clare Leighton

Date: 1931

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

Object number: 1996.33.a

Text Entries: Artist and author Clare Leighton (1898-1989) was raised in London and traveled widely during the 1920s and 1930s, emigrating to the United States from Britain in 1939. Nearly all of her wood engravings produced during these years, however, celebrate the perennial, rooted existence of farmers and other outdoor laborers, whom Leighton saw as obedient to the "natural rhythms" of the seasons. Her figures are often anonymous, subsumed into the teeming circular forms and boldly contrasted light and dark of her fields and forests. Leighton's formal education halted at age twelve because her mother, a popular romance novelist, believed that "school takes all the character and charm from a woman." The artist compensated for this as a young woman, however, regularly incorporating adventure into her search for engraving subjects; the Lumbercamp series was inspired by Leighton's solitary visit to the forests of Ottawa in the winter of 1930.

Clare Leighton

Date: 1931

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

Object number: 1996.33.b

Text Entries: Artist and author Clare Leighton (1898-1989) was raised in London and traveled widely during the 1920s and 1930s, emigrating to the United States from Britain in 1939. Nearly all of her wood engravings produced during these years, however, celebrate the perennial, rooted existence of farmers and other outdoor laborers, whom Leighton saw as obedient to the "natural rhythms" of the seasons. Her figures are often anonymous, subsumed into the teeming circular forms and boldly contrasted light and dark of her fields and forests. Leighton's formal education halted at age twelve because her mother, a popular romance novelist, believed that "school takes all the character and charm from a woman." The artist compensated for this as a young woman, however, regularly incorporating adventure into her search for engraving subjects; the Lumbercamp series was inspired by Leighton's solitary visit to the forests of Ottawa in the winter of 1930.

Clare Leighton

Date: 1931

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

Object number: 1996.33.c

Text Entries: Artist and author Clare Leighton (1898-1989) was raised in London and traveled widely during the 1920s and 1930s, emigrating to the United States from Britain in 1939. Nearly all of her wood engravings produced during these years, however, celebrate the perennial, rooted existence of farmers and other outdoor laborers, whom Leighton saw as obedient to the "natural rhythms" of the seasons. Her figures are often anonymous, subsumed into the teeming circular forms and boldly contrasted light and dark of her fields and forests. Leighton's formal education halted at age twelve because her mother, a popular romance novelist, believed that "school takes all the character and charm from a woman." The artist compensated for this as a young woman, however, regularly incorporating adventure into her search for engraving subjects; the Lumbercamp series was inspired by Leighton's solitary visit to the forests of Ottawa in the winter of 1930.

Clare Leighton

Date: 1931

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

Object number: 1996.33.d

Text Entries: Artist and author Clare Leighton (1898-1989) was raised in London and traveled widely during the 1920s and 1930s, emigrating to the United States from Britain in 1939. Nearly all of her wood engravings produced during these years, however, celebrate the perennial, rooted existence of farmers and other outdoor laborers, whom Leighton saw as obedient to the "natural rhythms" of the seasons. Her figures are often anonymous, subsumed into the teeming circular forms and boldly contrasted light and dark of her fields and forests. Leighton's formal education halted at age twelve because her mother, a popular romance novelist, believed that "school takes all the character and charm from a woman." The artist compensated for this as a young woman, however, regularly incorporating adventure into her search for engraving subjects; the Lumbercamp series was inspired by Leighton's solitary visit to the forests of Ottawa in the winter of 1930.

Clare Leighton

Date: 1931

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

Object number: 1996.33.e

Text Entries: Artist and author Clare Leighton (1898-1989) was raised in London and traveled widely during the 1920s and 1930s, emigrating to the United States from Britain in 1939. Nearly all of her wood engravings produced during these years, however, celebrate the perennial, rooted existence of farmers and other outdoor laborers, whom Leighton saw as obedient to the "natural rhythms" of the seasons. Her figures are often anonymous, subsumed into the teeming circular forms and boldly contrasted light and dark of her fields and forests. Leighton's formal education halted at age twelve because her mother, a popular romance novelist, believed that "school takes all the character and charm from a woman." The artist compensated for this as a young woman, however, regularly incorporating adventure into her search for engraving subjects; the Lumbercamp series was inspired by Leighton's solitary visit to the forests of Ottawa in the winter of 1930.