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Elizabeth Nourse
1859–1938
BirthplaceMount Healthy, Ohio, United States of America
Death placeParis, France
BiographyA lifelong expatriate based in France, Elizabeth Nourse made a successful career as a painter of genre scenes, or images of everyday life, featuring European peasants and mothers with their children. Nourse was a native of Cincinnati. She studied at the Cincinnati School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City. By the time she completed her studies, at the age of twenty-two, she had exhibited her work in the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition of 1879. She supported herself doing decorative and easel painting until 1887, when her savings allowed her to pursue further study in Paris, accompanied by her older sister, Louise. Nourse’s training and experience in Cincinnati as a working painter were so extensive that she left the Académie Julian, a popular art school, after a mere three months. Shortly thereafter, one of her paintings was accepted into the competitive annual juried exhibition known as the Salon. She would be a regular Salon exhibitor for more than two decades.
Over the next five years, Nourse traveled extensively, often accompanied by Louise and fellow women artists. During stays in Russia, Ukraine, Holland, Austria, and the French countryside, she found ample material for her oil and watercolor paintings of life in traditional rural societies; she also made landscapes. In 1890–91 the Nourse sisters lived in Italy; devout Catholics, they joined a lay group known as the Third Order of Saint Francis. In 1893 Nourse traveled back to the United States, her only return visit. That year, three of her paintings hung in the art exhibition at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, and the Cincinnati Museum Association (predecessor of the Cincinnati Art Museum) mounted an exhibition of one hundred of her works, many of which then went on view at the V. G. Fischer Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., her primary American dealer.
The artist’s success enabled her to take up permanent residence in Paris. She showed her work regularly in both American and European exhibitions and enjoyed considerable international patronage and prestige. In 1899–1900, Nourse served as president of the American Woman’s Art Association in Paris, and in 1901 she was elected to the prestigious Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Her accomplishment as an American woman artist in France parallels that of her friend and more famous contemporary Mary Cassatt; both built reputations largely on images of women and children. Like Cassatt, Nourse never married. She had a lifelong companion and business partner in Louise, whose death precipitated her own, days before her seventy-ninth birthday. The painter’s success and her sister’s careful management allowed Nourse to leave a considerable estate to her four nieces. She outlived the taste for the subjects and style on which she had built her reputation. More recently, however, renewed attention to women artists and to academically trained figural painters has helped restore Nourse’s reputation. In 1983 she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition organized jointly by the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Over the next five years, Nourse traveled extensively, often accompanied by Louise and fellow women artists. During stays in Russia, Ukraine, Holland, Austria, and the French countryside, she found ample material for her oil and watercolor paintings of life in traditional rural societies; she also made landscapes. In 1890–91 the Nourse sisters lived in Italy; devout Catholics, they joined a lay group known as the Third Order of Saint Francis. In 1893 Nourse traveled back to the United States, her only return visit. That year, three of her paintings hung in the art exhibition at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition, and the Cincinnati Museum Association (predecessor of the Cincinnati Art Museum) mounted an exhibition of one hundred of her works, many of which then went on view at the V. G. Fischer Art Gallery in Washington, D.C., her primary American dealer.
The artist’s success enabled her to take up permanent residence in Paris. She showed her work regularly in both American and European exhibitions and enjoyed considerable international patronage and prestige. In 1899–1900, Nourse served as president of the American Woman’s Art Association in Paris, and in 1901 she was elected to the prestigious Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Her accomplishment as an American woman artist in France parallels that of her friend and more famous contemporary Mary Cassatt; both built reputations largely on images of women and children. Like Cassatt, Nourse never married. She had a lifelong companion and business partner in Louise, whose death precipitated her own, days before her seventy-ninth birthday. The painter’s success and her sister’s careful management allowed Nourse to leave a considerable estate to her four nieces. She outlived the taste for the subjects and style on which she had built her reputation. More recently, however, renewed attention to women artists and to academically trained figural painters has helped restore Nourse’s reputation. In 1983 she was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition organized jointly by the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and the Cincinnati Art Museum.