Lives Enriched by Art
In 1836, Rosa Bonheur spent entire days at the Louvre copying works of the Old Masters. Five years later at the age of 19, she exhibited her first paintings at the Paris Salon. A careful observer of nature, she won celebrity as one of Europe’s finest animaliers (painters of animals), was the first woman inducted into the French Legion of Honor, and served for a decade as director of the Girls’ Drawing School in Paris. By the time of her death in 1899, her success and active support of other women artists had helped bring about the acceptance of women artists in the 20th century.
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, American artists flocked to Giverny to study the work of the Impressionist master, Claude Monet. In Paris, some spent evenings engaged in fascinating exchanges at Gertrude Stein’s where the famous poet and art patron exhibited early works of the Cubists, including Picasso. Among the American artists to visit Stein’s salon was Alice Schille, a water colorist who was little known outside of her native Ohio in her day.
Like Rosa Bonheur, she began painting as a child, and throughout her life, Alice’s work was inspired by travel. For much of her adult life, she taught at the Columbus Art School and kept house in the family home for her mother. But when school let out, she packed her easel and watercolors, and set off on painting tramps abroad. Her work is a dazzling record of summers spent London, Paris, Nice, Brittany, the Dalmatian Coast, Belgium, Mexico, Santa Fe, Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia.
Alice’s summer wanderings fed her artistic life and spirit. While visiting Santa Fe in her early fifties, Alice met Georgia O’Keefe. The following winter months while Alice taught and tended house back in Columbus, it is likely that her thoughts wandered often back to Santa Fe and the luminous light of its Southwestern sky. A reviewer recently described Alice Schille as a painter “whose quick eye saw beauty everywhere and whose extraordinarily sure hand transcribed it. In dark times, her watercolors are a bright spot.”
In my life, art has always been a bright spot. By extension, my life has been richly touched by the passions of artists who apply color to canvas, capture images viewed though a camera lens, sculpt with clay, cast figures in bronze, chisel statues out of stone, create paper from spent flowers, and imagine new directions for a modern cathedral. As a writer who strives to create images with words, I am drawn to artists who give energy to capturing light and life through their art.
This month our 22-year-old granddaughter Catalina who is both an artist and a scholar (and recent graduate of Cambridge University) begins a postgraduate degree at Courtauld Institute of Art. It is a research-led independent College of the University of London that is one of the world’s most prestigious programs of art history, curating and conservation. Like Alice Schiller, she is a gifted watercolorist and I am sure this next chapter in her life will be a joy for Cata as she interacts with artists past and present who capture light and life through their art.
