Gertrude Fiske: WWI

"The Carpenter" by Gerdtrude Fiske

"The Fiske family played their part in World War I and suffered their own tragedies. In 1916, Gerturde's sister Hannah was listed as a student at the School of the MFA in Modeling, which that year was taught by the sculptor Bela Pratt. The following year, both Gertrude and Hannah trained to be ambulance drivers. Hannah left for France and was stationed in Paris, driving the French wounded under the direction of the Shurtleff Memorial Relief organization. Gardiner and Eben, Gertrude's brothers, both served in the war as well. Eben was killed in action in 1917, and Hannah developed meningitis upon her return from France and died in 1919. 

After her mother died in 1920, Gertrude the oldest unmarried daughter, moved in to care for her father at the family home. He died in 1930, and she returned to the family home in Weston and maintained a large studio in a well-finished barn on the property.

The 1920s were marked by numerous major awards and Fiske's significant nomination as the first woman member of the Massachusetts State Art Commission in 1930. She was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1922 and by 1930 had become a full Academician. Her painting, 'The Carpenter,' won the Thomas B. Clarke prize at the National Academy of Design in 1922. A contemporary reviewer remarked that its bold composition and abbreviated setting '...is the very essence of what pleases the modern public in the art gallery, the theatre and the fiction department of the library, an unremarkable figure looking remarkable through adroitly contrived placing, a background and lighting that have more to do with the effect than the figure itself.' These 'unremarkable' characters were a strong theme for Fiske in the 1920s and 1930s - portraits of older men and women always depicted with a strong play of shadow and light, expressive in their painterly style and even tender - painted at a time when her own parents were at the end of their lives."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Gertrude Fiske: American Master" by Carol Walker Aten (Author), Lainey McCartney (Author), Richard M. Candee (Author) and Gerald W.R. Ward. (Editor).)