Ella Condie Lamb: Life in the City

"Portrait of a Young Model" by Ella Condie Lamb

"The move to the city entirely changed Ella Condie Lamb's life, but respect and a sense of honor for the forms of tree and flower, forests, clouds, sky, mountains, indeed for all of Nature, had been established. She chose nature often as subject matter and would never presume to distort its forms - 'God's handiwork.' On the contrary, the natural world was to be closely observed and recorded with the same 'passionate love of nature' conveyed by her mother 'and born in me.' 

They lived on the northeast corner of 22nd Street and 9th Avenue in Kingston, NY, in a four-story house of which her father's business, a pharmacy, was the lowest floor. She attended Public School 45 for girls, and wrote: 

'There was one study I never had enough of - Drawing, under Frank Melville. First geometric forms, until I was allowed to copy lithographs...and kept at it until some of my original badly designed panels decorated the back of the platform. Miss Tate, the principal, had an exaggerated idea of my ability. I was always sent with a companion to buy art materials for the school. It was an intense pleasure to handle the pretty papers and pick out crayons and pencils and the leather or paper stumps. I had many household chores to do, but the afternoons were my own. I usually spent the time drawing, sometimes from lithographs, sometimes from still life ... or copying illustrations by Jasper K. Kelly in 'St. Nicholas' magazine...I admired his vigorous drawings immensely.'

It is at this point in her memoirs that Ella wrote eloquently of her joy when at last she was allowed to study the disciplines of Art every day:

'Impatient was I to get to some artwork. Bowing to my sister Lizzie's illness and her coming home for a time with two children and my mother's need of help, wait I had to, until December 1878, when I entered the Antique class at the National Academy. Life opened and blossomed and was full to the brim with the fullness and rapture and absorption only a student of any form of art can know.'

Her formal training had begun, and a year later her brother-in-law, the noted engraver Victor Bernstrom, impressed by her ability, wrote, 'You stand on the threshold of an art world.' She was just sixteen."

To be continued

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