The Red Rose Girls: Jessie Willcox Smith, Pt. 2

"Round the Ring of Roses" by Jessie Willcox Smith

"Jessie Willcox Smith was twenty-one years old when she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. The tuition was inexpensive, $100 for a term of five months, and the school was elegant. By 1884, it was housed in its sixth location, an impressive mansion that had been the home of the actor Edwin Forrest. Situated in a fashionable neighborhood, surrounded by gracious homes on large, well-tended lots, it was a beautiful setting for an inferior education.

But Jessie's patience with the structured and outdated method of teaching drawing from the flat did not last long, and although there would be significant changes for the better just a few years in the future, at that time the only new innovation was the hiring of a professor to teach a class in carpet and upholstery design. Jessie wanted more. She convinced her family to allow her to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she came under the tutelage of the school's director, the notorious and volatile Thomas Eakins.  

Although Smith confided in her friends that she thought Eakins was a 'madman,' his classes improved her work. Under his tutelage she studied anatomy, perspective, and photography, yet she objected to his approach. Her own artistic vision, which was more romantic than realistic, never meshed with Eakins' insistence on rigorous confrontation with nature. She persisted in her studies at the Academy, working with Thomas Anshuntz and James B. Kelly, two of Eakins' former students who carried on the intent of the curriculum after his dismissal as director.

She never publicly discussed her presence at the school during this most turbulent time in the institution's distinguished history. Conflict of any kind caused her to feel profoundly uncomfortable. Her penchant for avoiding acrimony ruled her personal and professional life and manifested itself in her idealistic and often joyous paintings."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Red Rose Girls" An Uncommon Story of Art and Love" by Alice A. Carter.)