Ella Condie Lamb: The Dodge Prize

"An Advent Angel"
by Ella Condie Lamb

"Ella was a thorough professional about her work for the Studios, although she once protested to Charles that she 'was not meant for it.' She was able to accomplish the work because she had discipline and because she regarded art not only as self-expression but also as the means by which to make a living, an attitude which was respected by her colleagues.

The character of the art which she pursued privately, however, was a continuation of her childhood need to observe - to express discovery of the world: children, friends, garden, boats on the river, landscapes of fields and mountains, birch trees in a grove and water lilies scattered over the surface of a pond. 

One painting, 'An Advent Angel,' she conceived and executed was submitted to competition at the National Academy of Design. It won the Dodge Prize, an award given by the Academy to 'the best picture painted by a woman in the United States.' There were more than half a hundred women exhibitors that year. The lovely painting was also accepted for the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, receiving honorable mention, then was exhibited favorably in 1890 next to a painting by Berthe Morisot, before being featured in 'The Century Magazine' in 1893. 

Four months after Ella had won the Dodge Prize, her first son Richard Condie Lamb was born. But in January of that year he died, aged five months, a victim of diphtheria. When she saw that her precious son was going to die, she decided to draw him. She would have no tangible remembrance of him unless she did. Ella's Dodge Prize money was used to endow a special room for severe surgical cases in the Babies Hospital, and a marble tablet bearing little Richard Condie's name and date of death was affixed there.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Ella's Certain Window" by Barea Lamb Seeley.)