Ella Condie Lamb: Cornish

"Boy with Bangs" by Ella Condie Lamb

"Due to the demands of Charles' career, he traveled frequently to Europe. In June 1892, Charles took an extensive business trip there, and Ella journeyed to Windsor, Vermont, with their second son, Karl, to paint and to work. Instructors and artists whom Charles knew well from his years as president of the Arts Students League spent the summer in neighboring Cornish, New Hampshire: Thomas Dewing and his wife Maria, George de Forest Brush and his family, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Abbot Thayer among them. Their old friend, Henry Prellwitz was also in Cornish and arranged for a place for Ella, Karl, and Ella's young helper, Mary, to live.

Her long and conversational letters give immediacy to life in the colony: her feelings of loneliness for Charles, of the discomfort she comes to feel upon discovery of friction between several of the artists in Cornish, and the question of combining art with motherhood (she was working on a portrait of Karl):

• 'Saturday Joe Evans called in an old greatcoat with an old horse and buggy. I asked to be informed of the 'feud' for my own safety. It seems the Henry Walkers have been making violent enemies of the Dewings and Mrs. Lazarus, who, with the Saint-Gaudens, do not recognize them. Mr. Brush has sided with the Walkers and he and Dewing don't speak now. Isn't it stupid?'
  
  
• '[George de Forest Brush] told me plainly that as a mother I should give up painting - for we cannot serve two masters, and maternity and art each demand all of one's energies. I find truly that the boy does need me more and more as his mind develops. This is the time he takes impressions. It is a hard question and yet not too hard - for I have always felt that way, that we cannot serve two masters. But I must help my husband, too...'
  
  Nevertheless Mr. Brush gave me encouragement this afternoon. He thanks I have 'an exceedingly promising start.'...I am in that dreadful place that comes in all portraits that are carried far, when it looks hopeless, but I must be braver than this and more confident...'
  
  
• 'Oh dear, I am so lonely without my husband, my comrade, my 'shield' ...how happy I shall be when you return, in our dear home! I hold tight to Karl, when I can catch him or when I go to bed and feel as if I had part of you... Please try not to worry. Think of your little woman as working and will have a good thing to show you, and your son is growing strong and chubby and manly like his father... Be careful my husband, my dear husband - my baby's father. You are all we have.'

To be continued

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