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Eliza Draper Gardiner
1871–1955
BirthplaceProvidence, Rhode Island, United States of America
Death placeEdgewood, Rhode Island, United States of America
BiographyEliza Draper Gardiner was a talented color printmaker best known for her images of children in which the coy charm of her subjects vies for attention with her innovative style of simplified shapes of pure, flat color. Gardiner studied art at the Friends School in her native Providence, Rhode Island, and enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, from which she graduated in 1897. That year, at the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, she exhibited decorative ironwork, evidence of her wide-ranging education in crafts. After further studies in Europe, Gardiner became a pupil of painter Charles H. Woodbury (1864–1940), who likely introduced her to etching. It was as a woodcut printmaker, however, that Gardiner emerged, exhibiting in Europe and the United States beginning in 1910. She was influenced by the color woodcuts of innovative printmaker Arthur Wesley Dow and by the Japanese prints that had inspired him; she may also have drawn on the example of the decorative prints of English contemporary Sir William Nicholson, with their bold shapes and distinctive borders.
In 1908, Gardiner began a three-decade career as an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1916, she began her association with the so-called Provincetown printmakers, a group of innovative artists based in Provincetown, Massachusetts, who experimented in color relief techniques. Gardiner never used the so-called white line method associated with them, however, preferring a technique more closely grounded in Japanese tradition. Gardiner was most active as a printmaker in the late 1910s and 1920s. Settling in a barn converted into a studio at Pawtucket Cove, near Edgewater, Rhode Island, she found numerous subjects at nearby beaches, parks, and meadows, particularly children at play. She exhibited her work widely, as far away as California.
Gardiner was included in landmark exhibitions of color prints at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1919 and at the Brooklyn Museum in 1933. In 1932, however, she made ten lithographs, her only works in that medium, which were printed in New York by master printer George C. Miller. She spent that summer in the artists’ colony at St. Ives, a fishing village on the coast of Cornwall, England. Little is known of Gardiner’s output in the last two decades of her life. She continued teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design until 1939, and her studio was a gathering-place for generations of her students. Largely forgotten in the post-war period, Gardiner is remembered today as one of her era’s most important practitioners of color woodcut technique.
In 1908, Gardiner began a three-decade career as an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1916, she began her association with the so-called Provincetown printmakers, a group of innovative artists based in Provincetown, Massachusetts, who experimented in color relief techniques. Gardiner never used the so-called white line method associated with them, however, preferring a technique more closely grounded in Japanese tradition. Gardiner was most active as a printmaker in the late 1910s and 1920s. Settling in a barn converted into a studio at Pawtucket Cove, near Edgewater, Rhode Island, she found numerous subjects at nearby beaches, parks, and meadows, particularly children at play. She exhibited her work widely, as far away as California.
Gardiner was included in landmark exhibitions of color prints at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1919 and at the Brooklyn Museum in 1933. In 1932, however, she made ten lithographs, her only works in that medium, which were printed in New York by master printer George C. Miller. She spent that summer in the artists’ colony at St. Ives, a fishing village on the coast of Cornwall, England. Little is known of Gardiner’s output in the last two decades of her life. She continued teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design until 1939, and her studio was a gathering-place for generations of her students. Largely forgotten in the post-war period, Gardiner is remembered today as one of her era’s most important practitioners of color woodcut technique.