Page:Woman in Art.djvu/155

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WOMAN IN ART

aquarelles from camel hair point or broad sweep produce even more charming results, for even in shadows a blending of color has a place and charm.

Miss Wales studied first under Grundman, then with William Morris Hunt, "that great apostle of art who exerted a great influence on the art of America through the medium of his teaching."

Be they in charcoal or color, the interiors done by Miss Wales remind one of the same subjects painted by Bosboom and others by Bloommers. Her evident enjoyment of interiors may have led her to study in Holland with Bloommers. In Paris it was Carolus-Duran who aided her art study, and later still she painted with Vincenzo Povda, a Spanish painter of note in Rome.

Miss Wales is still in working trim, and as ever, in her long life, is full of appreciation of truth and beauty in art.

Few women are natural landscape painters; they do not love it seriously. It was the little town of Waterville in the center of New York state that became the home of Charlotte Buell-Coman in 1833. Her childhood was spent amid the picturesque rolling hills and valleys of that peaceful part of the country, hence those phases of life and beauty found expression in her later years on many a canvas, and in her exquisite water colors as well as in oils.

She was a remarkable woman in many ways: strong and cheerful under severe trials, not the least of which was the affliction of deafness which was a handicap through most of her life; yet she made herself known to art lovers through her poetic interpretations of the nature she loved and painted.

Mrs. Coman began landscape painting as a pupil under James R. Brevoort in New York, and later with Harry Thompson and Emil Vernier in Paris, where she lived for some years, studying also the works of Daubigny and Corot.

The spirit of Corot's painting was by far more akin to her own, a native endowment in both. She, too, loved the ideal in nature, as when morning mists soften and blend sky, earth and water into almost a dream of what one sees at mid-day. Before she had seen a Corot her own color schemes were often in the silvery tones.

Many of her best paintings are in Boston, New York, and Paris. To the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia (1876) she sent "A French Village," and to the Paris Exhibition of 1878 a choice canvas, "Near Fontainebleau." A "Sunset at the Seaside in France" was on exhibition in Boston in

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