Ella Condie Lamb: The Art Students League

"Portrait of William Merritt Chase"
by J.S. Sargent

"Ella Condie Lamb left the National Academy of Design and entered a school where, '...everyone worked intensely, with a single purpose - to fit one's self for a life work.' So wrote Ella about her three years of study at the Art Students League.

This move was a major event in her life. She and her friend, Laura went at one into the League's Life Drawing classes taught by Walter Shirlaw and C.Y. Turner, and into William Merritt Chase's painting class. The League had been formed only six years before. Wrote Allen Tucker: 

'Without influence, without money, without a building, they started the first independent art school in the country. They hired teachers they thought well of... They made a place where people could come and study. The student paid for a month or for a year. A body of students grew up for no other reason on earth than to learn, men and women working for the sake of really knowing, with no certificate and no reward.'

Ella described her class with William Merritt Chase:

'He put us first at the skull, for construction, then the model, with soft charcoal - 'use it like paint.' Every morning I bought a loaf of brown bread which I kneaded into pellets for erasure as did the other students. The floor became covered with crumbs and pellets. The moment the room was empty large tame rats appeared from behind stacked stretchers for their daily feast until faithful Thomas appeared with his broom.

Chase let us set our palettes with big gobs of paint and we used large brushes. He alternated us from the portrait head - a new one each day - to still life arranged from his own collection of draperies, copper, brass, and pottery. He introduced us to 'Hunt's Talks on Art,' which we carried around like prayer books. His own talks were especially valuable. 

Always immaculate, with light spats and black-ribboned eyeglasses, he would seize some fortunate student's palette and work for an hour while we all watched breathlessly (never a dab of paint on himself). This fine frenzy of his has been perpetuated in Sargent's portrait of him in the Metropolitan Museum.

He acquainted us with Millet and the Dutch and Spanish masters by the photographs he brought to class or by his own copies in his wonderful studio on 10th Street, which we were invited to visit on Saturday afternoons.'"