A new exhibition about Susan Watkins explores the challenges of female artists at the turn of the 20th century
By Anne Underwood
In 1910, the American artist Susan Watkins returned triumphant from more than a decade in Paris. During her time abroad, she had won an honorable mention and a third-class gold medal at the Paris Salon, plus a silver medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis. Her teacher William Merritt Chase considered her “the best woman painter living,” according to a letter from Chase’s wife. If Watkins had lived longer, she would likely have achieved greater prominence. But three years after her return from Paris, she was dead, apparently from cancer. She was just 38 years old.
Memory of Watkins’s work quickly faded, as tastes in the art world turned toward the avant-garde. But now an exhibition organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, is helping to reinsert her name into the narrative of art history. Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era aims to shine a light on Watkins, together with other American women artists who moved in the same circles in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But what about their daughters? What did respectable fathers think of their precious offspring entering the dubious realm of professional artists, who made sketches of nude models as part of their training?
It was a time of transition in the art world and society at large. In America, art had finally become a profession. As the architect Henry Bacon observed in 1882, “Respectable fathers who had respectable grandfathers now allow their sons to [become artists] even before they have made failures at several other professions.” But what about their daughters? What did respectable fathers think of their precious offspring entering the dubious realm of professional artists, who made sketches of nude models as part of their training? Perhaps not surprisingly, many women would ultimately limit themselves to decorative arts, if they made a career of art at all. Not Watkins.
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Image credit: Susan Watkins (1875–1913), Woman Playing a Guitar, 1901. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 in. The Thomas H. and Diane DeMellJacobsen Ph.D. Foundation. Photo courtesy of Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers.