Making Their Mark with Watercolor on Ivory

In the 1890s a group of American artists initiated a renaissance of miniature painting. These painters revitalized the medium by expanding its range of subjects and introducing techniques reflective of modern developments in painting, while maintaining a commitment to masterful craftsmanship and traditional materials. The Art Students League was situated at the center of this revival, serving as the base for a community of the leading artists who studied and taught there. This group of League-affiliated artists established the contours of the miniature medium that enjoyed continuous appreciation during the first half of the twentieth century, but which currently is generally neglected. My discussion begins with the first article, “Big Things Come in Small Packages” and is continued here.

Alice Beckington’s and Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s instruction was rigorous, and many of their students became the leading miniaturists of the next generation (fig. 10). Though their focus may have been on portraiture, evidence suggests that they aspired to integrate instruction in miniature painting with students’ broad-based training in depicting the whole human figure. On two occasions the Board of Control authorized the Miniature class to hire nude models, and it may be that there were other instances of nude models posing that were not recorded.⁴⁴ The seated woman portrayed in a miniature from Beckington’s class, though clothed, was probably a hired model (fig. 11). The salutary effects of instruction on the general quality of miniatures was noted by Alice T. Searle in her review of the 1911 American Society of Miniature Painters’ exhibition: “In the non-members’ group undoubtedly much of the best work shown was the outcome of the influence of the new classes in miniature painting in the leading art schools of the country. The establishment of these classes has secured new respect for the art and given it a fundamental strength and stability which of late years it has sadly needed.”⁴⁵ It may be argued whether in specific cases a critic was being patronizing or sincerely admiring, but many writers recognized the dominance of women artists in this field: “Twenty or twenty-five young women students make up the interesting class that, under the instruction of a woman, Miss Alice Beckington, is trying to master the delicate details of the tiny ivory portrait…it is one of the few classes in the league that is under the instruction of a woman.”⁴⁶

The 1915-16 term was the last that miniature painting was taught at the League. It may not have been a coincidence that the American School of Miniature Painting opened in October, 1914, on East 59th Street. Lucia Fairchild Fuller, Elsie Dodge Pattee, and Mabel R. Welch served as the regular instructors, with guest criticisms given by Laura Coombs Hills, William J. Whittemore, and others.⁴⁷ The school was the only one in New York City to focus on miniature painting, and many young painters who studied at the League were students there too. The school remained in operation until the spring of 1924.

Helen Winslow Durkee (later Mileham) (1880-1954) invested time and energy at the League, honing her skills while she embarked on a career as a miniaturist. She was elected to the Board of Control in January, 1910, and continued to serve on it through 1918, including a seven-year stint as a vice president.⁴⁸ Her earliest documented association with the League is the announcement that she won the general scholarship for Miniature Painting in 1908, indicating she was Beckington’s student during the 1907-08 season, if not also previously.⁴⁹ Her training in miniature painting technique was then underpinned by diligent study of the figure in years of Life classes with different instructors. She won an honorable mention for either DuMond or Cox Women’s Life Painting in 1909 and the DuMond Life Drawing scholarship in May 1911. Durkee’s scholarship drawing in the League’s collection displays a well-proportioned figure with subtle modeling to capture the play of light across the body’s surfaces, as is typical of DuMond’s students (fig. 12).⁵⁰ She took Kenneth Hayes Miller’s Women’s Life class for five months during the 1911-12 season, but over the next few years she became an acolyte of George B. Bridgman. She attended his series of anatomy lectures three separate times from 1910 to 1913, and she registered for either his morning or afternoon Women’s Life class during the 1912, 1913, 1914, and 1916 winter terms. Over the years of study with Bridgman she absorbed his methods, and won the Bridgman Women’s PM Life scholarship in May 1914, and the Bridgman Women’s AM Life scholarship in May of the following year.⁵¹ Her 1914 scholarship drawing reproduced in the 1914-15 course catalogue is more sculptural and anatomically precise than her DuMond scholarship drawing, reflecting the influence of Bridgman’s instruction (fig. 13).⁵² Though the League does not possess the Bridgman scholarship drawing, a sense of its subtler qualities may be inferred from a drawing in the collection by Durkee’s classmate, Elizabeth C. Crittenden (1866-1963) (fig. 14).⁵³ After all of Durkee’s classes with Bridgman she still had not had enough figure drawing, and studied with F. Luis Mora in his Women’s Life classes from 1914 to 1918. The full figure and anatomy were not all she studied, however, and she registered for Chase’s Portrait and Still-Life Painting in 1910-11 and 1911-12, DuMond’s Portrait Painting in 1911-12, and Dimitri Romanoffsky’s Portrait Painting in 1914-15.⁵⁴ She spent September 1911 painting landscapes at the League’s summer school in Woodstock, New York.

A portrait of Durkee’s uncle, William Wells Durkee, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art dates her miniature painting as early as c. 1905, but she seems to have first shown her work publicly at the ASMP exhibition in 1907.⁵⁵ The following year she showed eight miniatures at the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters’ exhibition, representing the three genres she would pursue throughout her career: three portraits, three still lifes, and two figure studies. One of the latter, simply titled Study, was lent by the League, and was presumably the work it retained after awarding Durkee the general scholarship for miniature painting in 1908. She probably sent three of the eight miniatures, one from each genre, to the ASMP exhibition early in 1909, including Study. One reviewer both praised Durkee’s work and her League training, and gave a description of Study that matches the miniature by a Beckington student reproduced in the League’s 1908-09 course catalogue (fig. 11): “Two other artists who received their training at the league have contributed materially to raising the standard of the show. Miss Helen Winslow Durkee, whose work has for several years attracted notice, has sent three paintings of exceptional merit. The portrait of Miss E. [sic] is convincing and effective…. The study of a young woman with a fur cloak flung back from her rounded shoulders is admirable. Another panel shows a still life by this same artist, a little gem in its way.”⁵⁶ Though only the shoulder of the model was revealed in Study, in subsequent figure studies the model was nude. For example, Durkee exhibited Baigneuse at the PSMP 1909 exhibition and at the ASMP exhibitions of 1910 and 1912, and In the Studio at the PSMP 1916 and ASMP 1917 exhibitions.⁵⁷ The former was sold at auction in 2019, and the latter is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.⁵⁸ Besides her skill at depicting the female nude on view in these two works, her mastery of the nude child may also be seen in Little Richard (fig. 15), shown at the PSMP 1921 exhibition.⁵⁹ Durkee became a member of the PSMP in 1911 and the ASMP in 1917, and built up a significant exhibition record of portraits, still lifes, and nudes with these two societies. Her classes with Chase, DuMond, Miller, and Bridgman, in addition to Beckington, prepared her to succeed in all three genres.

The trajectory of Norma Whitelaw (later Pratt) (1891-2002) at the League ran parallel to Durkee’s, though she was eleven years younger. During the 1910-11 season, the first year for which her records exist, she focused her efforts for seven months on DuMond’s Women’s Life. As noted above, Durkee won a scholarship for that class, but Whitelaw apparently won a mention and had her drawing of a standing female model reproduced in the 1911-12 course catalogue (fig. 16).⁶⁰ The two spent September 1911 painting landscapes in Woodstock. The following winter term both attended Bridgman’s anatomy lectures, but Whitelaw returned to DuMond’s Women’s Life while Durkee switched to Miller’s, and in May Whitelaw was awarded a scholarship for her work in DuMond’s class.⁶¹ Though registration cards do not exist for the 1912-13 and 1913-14 seasons, she almost certainly continued her class work; she served on the Board of Control from 1912 to 1914, and she would not have wanted to let her scholarship go to waste.⁶² Whitelaw’s unfinished study of a standing female model in the collection displays the telltale sculptural approach of a Bridgman student’s drawing (fig. 17).⁶³ It was probably made in Bridgman’s Women’s Life at some time during the two winter seasons from 1912-14, when Durkee also invested time in absorbing his lessons. These classes provided Whitelaw a solid grounding in the representation of the human form, which she applied to her work in miniatures.

It is likely that during the years of missing records Whitelaw seriously committed herself to painting miniatures, since she took the Miniature class on either side of the gap. She registered for Beckington’s class for two months in the spring of 1912 and for Beckington and Fuller’s class for five months in the winter/spring of 1915. She showed two miniatures at the 1916 exhibitions of the PSMP and the New York Water Color Club, and exhibited a collection of works at an art school in Philadelphia in the spring of 1917.⁶⁴ She was listed in the directory of the 1917–18 American Art Annual as a miniature painter living in New York City.⁶⁵ In 1920 she married Wallace A. Pratt, a physician, and moved to Walla Walla, Washington, where she lived for decades. This took her away from the fertile artistic atmosphere of New York City, and though her artistic activity presumably slowed, there are indications that she continued to make paintings and exhibit at local venues.⁶⁶

A feeling of familiarity and camaraderie among the artists during their time at the League, which probably continued across the miles even when some moved away from New York City and its environs, may be sensed from the portraits they painted of fellow miniaturists. These works introduce us to a broader sampling of the accomplished miniaturists who passed through the League’s doors. As previously discussed, Beckington painted a miniature of her student Rosina Cox Boardman (1878-1970) (fig. 9). Boardman took classes at the League as a teenager from 1894-96, but returned for intensive study, taking Life classes with DuMond (1910-13) and Bridgman (1913-14, 1915-18) and Miniature with Beckington (and Fuller) from 1911-13 and 1914-16. Boardman won an honorable mention for the Miniature scholarship in May, 1912.⁶⁷ Her mastery of figure drawing and of miniature painting technique is evident in The Ivory Fan (1927) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.⁶⁸ Helen Winslow Durkee painted the portrait of fellow student Meta Steiniger (later Ireland) (1885-1916), shown at the PSMP 1908 and ASMP 1909 exhibitions.⁶⁹ Steiniger was awarded an honorable mention for the League’s Miniature scholarship in May 1908, and won the Still Life scholarship in May 1909.⁷⁰ She quickly achieved visibility in the galleries, showing her work at exhibitions of the ASMP in 1908, 1909, 1911, and 1912, of the PSMP in 1908, 1909, and 1910, of the New York Water Color Club in 1910, and of the American Water Color Society in 1908 and 1909.⁷¹ Her promising career ended too soon when she died at the age of 31.

Helen V. Lewis (1879-1946) showed portraits of Norma Whitelaw, and two other students, Ruth Brooks and Harriette Draper, at exhibitions in 1911, 1912, and 1915.⁷² Lewis took Antique and Life classes with Cox, Twachtman, and DuMond from 1901-03, followed by a gap in the records. She registered for Life with DuMond and Portrait with Chase in the 1910-11 term, and Beckington’s Miniature in March of 1912, but she spent productive years earlier at the League, particularly in Miniature classes, that are undocumented: she won an honorable mention for Miniature in the spring of 1908 and 1909, and was awarded the Miniature scholarship in the spring of 1910.⁷³ Lewis served on the Board of Control with Durkee from 1911-12.⁷⁴ The only extant registration card for Ruth Warner Brooks (later Soule) (1887-1912) records that she took Miniature and Chase Portrait during the 1910-11 season, but she was awarded an honorable mention for Miniature in May 1909, indicating that she studied with Beckington from 1908-09 and probably also from 1909-10. Brooks’ career was just taking off, with portraits and a nude study in the ASMP exhibitions of 1909 and 1911 and in the PSMP 1909 exhibition, when it was cut short by her early death in the summer of 1912.⁷⁵ Harriette E. Draper (later Gale) (1889-1968) registered for Miniature from 1910-11 and Chase Portrait from 1911-12, but she also probably studied with Beckington during previous seasons. She showed her miniatures in a string of ASMP and PSMP exhibitions beginning in 1911, and a miniature was accepted for display at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.⁷⁶ Her work was well received, and elicited the following praise in a review of the ASMP 1912 exhibition: “it is well to mention and welcome a recent graduate from the Art Students’ League, Harriet [sic] E. Draper, who showed a costume study and an exceptionally strongly rendered portrait, full of personality and force, yet as delicate as befits a miniature.”⁷⁷ Boardman, Durkee, Steiniger, Lewis, Whitelaw, Brooks, and Draper, all prominent artists in the miniature revival, were peers at the League.

Mary Schuessler (later Sauter) (1903-1984) followed in the footsteps of the earlier miniaturists and represents their legacy, but was too young to have taken their classes or to have worked alongside them at the League. Her earliest documented miniatures are still lifes and a portrait she exhibited in the spring of 1925, at the end of her first full year studying at the League.⁷⁸ Her career painting miniatures was partially outside of the limelight, and information about her life and artistic activity is rather scant.

She grew up in Roanoke, Alabama, before coming to New York City to study at the League about the spring of 1924, when the records show she took Bridgman’s Antique class. She demonstrated sufficient skill to gain admission to Bridgman’s AM Women’s Life class in the fall, which she took for seven months, supplemented by Bridgman’s evening anatomy lectures. She excelled in his class, and newspapers reported the League purchased one of her drawings, which Bridgman judged one of the best in his classes, in May of 1925. Presumably this is the sheet with a standing female figure in the League’s collection (fig. 18).⁷⁹

She traveled to Spain, France, and Italy in the summer of 1925 to study painting under George Elmer Browne, and it appears that during her sojourn a romance blossomed with fellow student Edwin Sauter, who also had studied at the League in the early 1920s.⁸⁰ The two were married in 1926, and she subsequently was known by her married name, Mary Sauter, or Mrs. Edwin Sauter. The couple lived in his home town of Schenectady, New York, until relocating to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1939, and then to Louisville, Kentucky in the early 1950s for Edwin’s job in the art department of General Electric. She taught art at the Brown School in Schenectady from 1928 to 1930.⁸¹ She exhibited work in New York City at the ASMP exhibitions in 1935, 1939, and 1947, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1944. She also showed works at regional exhibitions upstate, for example in Schenectady in 1928 and in Albany in 1938.⁸² Her miniature painting Jim (1939), held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, was a gift of the American Society of Miniature Painters (fig. 19), and attests to her affiliation with that society.⁸³

In one student’s case, training in miniature painting led to a career making portraits in another small-scale medium: cut paper silhouettes. Like miniature painting, the silhouette was a small-scale medium that had fallen out of favor in the late nineteenth century, but which was revivified in the twentieth through the efforts of a woman artist. (It is a medium put to use with powerful irony by the early twenty-first-century artist Kara Walker.) Beatrix Sherman (1894-1975), who changed her first name from Beatrice by 1913, but who kept her maiden name professionally after her marriage to Charles Belsh in 1919, resided in Chicago as a teenager and initially attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The first works she is known to have exhibited were two miniatures, included in the Annual Exhibition of Works by Chicago Artists at the Art Institute from February to March, 1914, followed by one miniature portrait and five silhouettes of figures—mostly portraits—shown in the Annual Exhibition of Water Colors, Pastels and Miniatures by American Artists at the same venue from May to June. The subject of one of her silhouettes was William M.R. French, then director of the Art Institute, and brother of famed sculptor Daniel Chester French. She traveled with her mother, Josephine, to Europe in the summer of 1914, and continued her studies, while cutting silhouettes in London and Paris. Her mother, who also cut silhouettes, would routinely assist at her daughter’s booth at world’s fairs and international expositions for decades to come.⁸⁴

Back in the United States in the fall, Sherman relocated from Chicago to Manhattan and enrolled in Alice Beckington and Lucia Fairchild Fuller’s Miniature class for two months, as well as Illustration with Charles Chapman. She was listed as a painter in the directory of the American Art Annual for 1915-16, but was starting to commit more to the silhouette medium.⁸⁵ She cut silhouettes at a booth for some of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, which lasted from February through December of 1915. The next registration record at the League documents a class she took for one month during the 1916-1917 season, but she may also have squeezed in classes from 1915-1916 between her work at the Panama-California International Exposition in San Diego and at her own studio on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.⁸⁶ Though the silhouette medium came to dominate her artistic activity for the sake of her livelihood, she came to miss painting, and in 1924 she acknowledged that “I gave up devoting all my life to profiles and decided to go back to miniatures and portraits as well.”⁸⁷

The class for which Sherman registered for one month in the fall of 1916 was Bridgman’s Evening Women’s Life. Though it is possible she simply joined Bridgman’s class this once, it is likely she was following up one or more months in his class the preceding winter term, or even at the summer school—a point to which I will return shortly. Instruction in life drawing would have strengthened her abilities to capture the posture and proportions of the figure. Seeing the figure as a whole was key to Sherman; she expressed in a 1919 interview, “it’s the full-length silhouette that catches likeness and character…I always do that kind, unless some one especially wants head and shoulders.”⁸⁸ Bridgman would also have helped develop her eye for outlines, on which the fidelity of her full-length portrait silhouettes would depend.

Sherman’s entrepreneurial spirit enabled her to make a living cutting silhouettes, not only through attracting individual portrait commissions, but also through publication of her work and through the sale of reproductions. She skillfully cultivated attention throughout her career, by advertising and becoming the subject of articles in newspapers. Her comfort with the spotlight is suggested by her involvement with theater while a student at the Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 20).⁸⁹ We get an idea of the quality of her work, as well as the kind of exposure it was receiving, from one of the many pages of silhouettes of New York socialites she produced for Cartoons Magazine throughout 1917 (fig. 21).⁹⁰ She sought out prominent individuals to portray, including U.S. presidents, royalty, athletes, actors, musicians, and artists, and obtained their signatures at the bottom of the silhouettes to legitimize the likenesses. She reportedly had amassed a collection of thousands of autographed silhouettes by 1920. She marketed reproductions of popular recent and historic sitters’ portraits in her archives, and she came up with the novel idea to mass-produce her silhouettes using a die-cutting process, to sell them in packages of animals and generic decorative figures. Adhesive was already applied to these “stick-ons,” making them ready for use “on lamp shades, hat boxes, candy boxes, stationery, place cards, [and] valentines.”⁹¹ She was praised for “turning what was an artistic talent, utilized on a necessarily limited scale, into an industrial art that promises a large wholesale development.”⁹² She operated her business out of offices in New York City until she moved to Palm Beach, Florida, in the 1950s, where she continued into her elder years.

On May 19, 1932, Sherman cut a silhouette of her instructor from sixteen years earlier, George B. Bridgman (fig. 22).⁹³ One could argue that she did so just because he had risen to a sufficient level of fame in the art world, but a pair of inscriptions on the reverse of the silhouette suggest instead that he meant something to her personally. She wrote in pencil, “Great teacher of the arts/ especially anatomy -/ Studied with Bridgman,” and signed her name beneath. The note affiliated her with Bridgman, and implied that she had learned something significant from his instruction; this supports the suggestion made above that she took classes with him for longer than a single month. A second inscription in blue ink, written while she was living in Palm Beach, documents that “The book on anatomy/ written by Bridgeman [sic]/ has been removed from/ my collection,” reflecting the value she placed on his Constructive Anatomy, a volume that may have entered her library shortly after the first edition was published in 1920. Undoubtedly Sherman’s time at the League contributed to her success in this popular, but overlooked, diminutive medium.

The artists discussed above all made their mark in the art world through their small-scale work, and raised the profile of their medium for decades in the first half of the twentieth century, even though their accomplishments have generally been under-recognized. The Art Students League served as a key training ground in miniature painting, where students acquired skills particular to watercolor painting on ivory, as well as a solid grounding in figural representation, so evident in drawings in the collection. These artists constituted a community who belonged to miniature societies and participated in their exhibitions, or took part in the shows as non-members. To this group could be added the names of the following miniaturists, who all took classes at the League during the first twenty years of the twentieth century and participated in this community: Louise Willis Snead (1868 or 1874-1958), Beatrice M. Rossire (1870-1948), May Fairchild (1872-1959), Sarah Eakin Cowan (1873-1958), Katharine A. McIntire (1876-1960), Eulabee Dix (later Becker) (1878-1961), Harriott L. King (1880-1954), Bernice Pauahi Andrews Fernow (1881–1969), Edna F. Huestis (later Simpson) (1882-1964), Marie Agnes H. Hyde (1882-1978), Elsie Motz Lowdon (1882/3-1960), Carlota Saint-Gaudens (1884–1927), Clara Louise Bell (1886–1978), Jeanne Payne (later Johnson) (1887-1958), Mary McLellan Hamilton (1891–1939), and Mary McMillan (1895-1958). Though basic biographical information has been assembled for most—though not all—of these miniaturists, there remains much to be discovered about this group of talented women artists and their activities at the League.⁹⁴

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Notes