Bessie Potter Vonnoh (American sculptor) 1872 - 1955
Bessie Potter Vonnoh was an American sculptor best known for her small bronzes, mostly of domestic scenes, and for her garden fountains. Bessie Potter was born in St Louis, Missouri, the only child of Ohio natives Alexander and Mary McKenney Potter. Her father died in 1874, in an accident, at age 38.:p. 7 By 1877, she and her mother had joined members of her mother's family in Chicago.: p. 9. In school she enjoyed clay-modeling class and decided at an early age that she wanted to be a sculptor. In 1886, at age 14, she enrolled in classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was able to afford the tuition only because a local sculptor, Lorado Taft, hired her to work as a studio assistant, on Saturdays. From 1890 to 1891 she studied with Taft at the Art Institute, as she completed its sculptor courses.:p. 11, 15 Vonnoh became one of the so-called "White Rabbits", women artists who assisted Taft on the sculpture program for the Horticultural Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She also produced an independent commission, the Personification of Art, for the Illinois State Building of the exposition. In 1895, she traveled to Europe, and met Auguste Rodin. Her best-known statuette, Young Mother (1896), used fellow "White Rabbit" Margaret Daisy Gerow (Mody) Proctor, wife of sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor, and their infant son as models. In 1898, she received the commission for a bust of General Samuel W. Crawford for the Smith Memorial Arch in Philadelphia. In 1899 she married impressionist painter Robert Vonnoh, at his home in Rockland Lake, New York, and honeymooned in Paris. At the 1900 Exposition Universelle, she was awarded a Bronze Medal for Young Mother and for another statuette, Dancing Girl. She exhibited at both the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, Missouri, where she was awarded a Gold Medal for a group of ten works. In 1933, her husband died at age 75. In 1937, she completed her best-known large-scale work, the Frances Hodgson Burnett Memorial in Central Park. She produced little after that. In March 1903, the New York Times noted that the Vonnohs were two of a dozen painters and sculptors who had gotten together to create a building specifically for their studios, at 27 West Sixty-Seventh Street in Manhattan. In mid-1903, the Vonnohs began summering in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and became long-time members of its Old Lyme Art Colony. In December 1912, the New York Times, writing about her works at the New York Academy of Art, called her figurines "lovely", of a "charming style", and said "we must applaud once more her skillful harmonizing of detail in the contemporary costume, her selection of the most distinguished line for emphasis." In 1915, Vonnoh exhibited in the Armory Show. In 1921, she was elected an academician of the National Academy of Design. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1931. In 1948, she remarried, to Dr. Edward L. Keyes, Jr., a widower, who died only nine months later. She died in New York City in 1955, at age 82. Vonnoh is buried alongside her first husband, Robert Vonnoh (1858 – 1933) in the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Source: Wikipedia * * * Robert William Vonnoh (American Impressionist painter) 1858 - 1933 Robert William Vonnoh was an American Impressionist painter known for his portraits and landscapes. He traveled extensively between the American East Coast and France, more specifically the artists colony Grez-sur-Loing. Robert William Vonnoh was born on 17 September 1858 in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied in Boston at the Massachusetts Normal Art School now called Massachusetts College of Art and Design, then in Paris at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. He taught at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (1879-1881), at the Cowles Art School in Boston (1884–1885), at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1883–1887), and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1891–1896). Vonnoh became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1906. His most well-known work In Flanders Field (also known as Where Soldiers Sleep and Poppies Grow or Coquelicots) was painted in 1890 in the fields of Grez-sur-Loing. This large oil on canvas, 59 x 104 inches, employed active and expressive brushstrokes to evoke the fiery cadmium red of poppies, a subject matter that was popular during that time among many painters. A young woman sits in the foreground, settling down to pick poppies in a vast field with two figures in the background. Although this was considered Vonnoh's most ambitious work, garnering great acclaim at fairs and exhibits, the painting never sold. It was not until 1919 when it was purchased directly by Joseph G. Butler, founder of The Butler Institute of American Art that In Flanders Field would find a permanent home. The painting is part of the permanent collection to this day in Youngstown, Ohio. Vonnoh died on 28 December 1933 in Nice and is buried alongside his wife in the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
