Elizabeth Nourse: At the McMicken School of Design

"Bust of Mary Noonan"
by Elizabeth Nourse

"When Thomas Noble came to Cincinnati in 1869 as the first director of the McMicken School of Design, he created for it a four-year curriculum based on the methods used in Munich, where he had studied with Carl Piloty before going to Paris to study with Thomas Couture. The school's first year was devoted to 'drawing from the flat' (which apparently meant copying etchings, engravings, lithographs, and other drawings), shading, anatomy, and perspective. During the second year the student advanced to drawing from round and solid casts and to composition and design. Only in the third year was color introduced and the student permitted to draw from nature. The same gradual approach was followed in the oil painting class, with the drawing of the subject preceding the application of paint.

By the time Elizabeth Nourse entered the school in 1874, it had become part of the municipal University of Cincinnati and tuition was free. The sketch she was required to submit to qualify for entry evidences the proficiency she had already attained from her lessons with Mary Spencer, a Cincinnati artist who took pupils in her studio. As a result Elizabeth was allowed, beginning in her third year, to undertake a number of special studies that the growing school had begun to offer in wood carving, oil and watercolor painting, etching, and sculpture. In 1877 Joseph Longworth gave the art school an endowment of $59,000 with the condition that the university add another $10,000 to increase the variety of subjects offered to its approximately three hundred pupils.

Having completed the basic four-year curriculum, Elizabeth continued her studies at McMicken for three additional years. During her final two years she devoted herself to sculpture, which she studied under Louis Rebisso, best known for his equestrian statues of General Grant in Lincoln Park, Chicago and General McPherson in McPherson Square, Washington, D.C. In his courses Rebisso followed the same careful progression as that observed in the drawing classes; from copies after antique casts to sculptures and from thence to the study of live models. Nourse's first sculptures were done in clay and terra cotta. A later work, 'Bust of Mary Noonan,' indicates why Preston Powers, son of Cincinnati's most famous sculptor, Hiram Powers, urged her to give up painting and devote herself to sculpture. Her work in the latter undoubtedly increased the perception of form already so strongly evident in her drawing."

To be continued

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