Breaking All Bounds
Women artists take center stage at Hawthorne Fine Art’s fall exhibit and sale
In the 19th century, formal artistic training was mainly reserved for men. Some tenacious women, however, pushed their way into the sphere of academic art.these women are the focus of a new exhibition and sale at Hawthorne Fine Art, Breaking All Bounds: American Women Artists (1819-1945).
“I have a longstanding interest in bringing these women forward,” says Jennifer C. Krieger, managing partner at Hawthorne Fine Art.“last year, we focused on earlier work, and this year’s exhibition is mainly artists working in the later 19th century and early 20th century. Recently we were fortunate to acquire a group of paintings by all women artists.” In total, the exhibition will feature between 60 and 65 works from women artists of various renown.
Krieger says,“most people know Jane Peterson.we want to highlight artists whether they are famous now, or deserve to be in the future.”
Known for her scenes of domestic life that often featured mothers and their children, Maria R. Dixon exhibited in the “Women’s Pavilion” at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. A Quiet Moment, completed a year before her death, features her daughter Tillie as a model. With her detailed depictions of nature, Fidelia Bridges was notably the first and only member of the American Watercolor Society. Orphaned at age 15, Bridges found work as a nanny before enrolling in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and she eventually settled in Philadelphia after studying further of study of painting in Italy. Her work appeared as greeting cards and were published in Scribner’s Monthly and various books. Her Birds in a Marshland Landscape is featured in the Hawthorne exhibition.
Hortense Ferne’s cityscape Activity, NYC, showcases the quickly modernizing city of 1935, one of her frequent subjects, in an impressionist style. In it, steamboats puff in the harbor, their smoke obscuring Manhattan’s growing skyline.
Other artists featured in Breaking All Bounds include John Singer Sargent’s fourth cousin Margarett Sargent,anna Claypoole Peale, Caroline Lord, Susie M. Barstow and more.the exhibition opens November 1 and remains on view through January 11, 2019.