Elizabeth Nourse: Holland

"In the Church at Volendam" by Elizabeth Nourse

"In July 1892 Elizabeth and Louise Nourse traveled with their Cincinnati friends Henriette and Laura Wachman to Holland and setted in Volendam, a small fishing village on the Zuyder Zee. The picturesque seacoast and costumed villagers had long since attracted numerous artists, and Elizabeth and Henriette, who had trained with her at McMicken as a carver and painter, may well have been following the lead of such prominent American colleagues as Gari Melchers and Walter MacEwen, who also painted on the Dutch coast.

The Nourse sisters rented a house on the village dyke with a kitchen shared by the four women, and Henriette and Laura rented a house on the sea that the two painters used as a studio. Clara MacChesney, a friend of Nourse's and a fellow exhibitor at the New Salon who often wrote about Elizabeth's activities shared:

'One is struck by the variety of her subjects . . . her sense of color is good; but perhaps her best quality is her handling of light and shade. Her work stands between the premier-coup of the average Salon pictures and the more finished tone-work of the Barbizon school . . .  Her canvases are nearly all large, and painted with a vigor that one seldom sees in a woman's work. She sometimes has the good quality of hardness, which nearly every artist of note has early in his career, but which becomes lost later in life. . . . She is mainly direct in her work, making but few slight sketches first, in pencil and in oil. She paints very rapidly and does not repaint, nor work for tone and quality, but generally carries her first conception through to the end.'

Working prodigiously during her happy three months in Holland, Nourse produced some twenty-two small pictures as well as four large ones. She returned to Paris in the fall with Louise and Charlotte Gibson Miller, another friend from her McMicken class who had come to visit. Charlotte wrote an article for a Cincinnati newspaper describing Elizabeth's new studio at 72, rue Notre Dame des Champs, which the Nourses had rented just before their departure for Volendam. She noted that Whistler had his atelier in the same block, as did Bouguereau and Elizabeth Gardner."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Cincinnati Societaire" by Mary Alice Heekin Burke in "Elizabeth Nourse, 1859-1938: A Salon Career.")