Elizabeth Nourse: Cincinnati Born

"Etude" by Elizabeth Nourse

"The youngest of the ten children of Caleb Elijah Nourse and Elizabeth LeBreton Rogers, Elizabeth and her twin sister Adelaide were born October 26, 1869, at their parents' summer home in Mount Healthy, Ohio - a suburb of Cincinnati. Young Caleb and his wife had been married in 1833 in the the beautiful Federal house (now the Taft Museum) and had become converts to Catholicism after hearing a dramatic debate between a Roman Catholic bishop and a Baptist. Religion was an important force in the lives of the couple and remained a profound influence on their children and on Elizabeth's concerns as an artist. 

Caleb had been prosperous, even establishing his own bank in 1856, but after the Civil War, times were hard. The bank failed and the family, as one sister wrote, 'went from very wealthy to very poor.' They moved frequently from one rented house to another. The longest they remained at one address was during a period of five years between 1873 and 1878, when they lived in Mount Auburn, the first of Cincinnati's hillside suburbs to be connected to the city center by an 'incline,' a means of public transportation similar to a cablecar.  By taking the incline and a horse- or mule-drawn trolley on the level stretches, the twins, Elizabeth and Adelaide, were able to attend school in the city.

In view of the family's straitened financial circumstances, Elizabeth was fortunate to have obtained excellent training in art while she was still very young. In 1874, when she was fifteen, Elizabeth (or Lizzie, as she was called) began art studies at the McMicken School of Design, which eventually became the Art Academy of the Cincinnati Art Museum. 

The school had originally been conceived by a group of women as the first step toward establishing an art museum in the city. The group had raised nine thousand dollars by holding an exhibition of paintings - primarily landscapes of the Dusseldorf school - owned by Cincinnatians. Charles McMicken had donated the property for the school and had added one thousand dollars for the purchase of plaster casts. Several trips to Europe were made to select the casts, as well as copies of old master paintings, for the proposed school. Litigation and the Civil War disrupted plans, and it was not until 1869 that the McMicken School of Design was finally established by a group of prominent Cincinnati men led by Joseph Longworth, Larz Anderson, and George Ward Nichols."

To be continued

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