Page:Woman of the Century.djvu/408

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HUMPHREY.
HUMPHREYS.
403

MAUD HUMPHREY. HUMPHREY, Miss Maud, artist, born in Rochester, N. Y., 30th March, 1868. From early childhood she showed a fondness for sketching. She began her first studies when she was twelve years old, in Rochester, under the tuition of Rev. J. H. Dennis, in a free evening school which met twice a week. After two winters of instruction, during which time she took a few lessons in oils, her eyes failed, and for two years she was unable to use them, even to read. At sixteen she began to illustrate some children's magazines and books. The following winter she went to New York City to study in the Art Students' League. Her studies were occasionally interrupted by commissions for illustrating. Returning to Rochester, she took two terms of instruction in water-colors, which is the only water-color instruction she received. Each winter found her in New York, trying to find time from her illustrating to study in the League, but about two months each winter was all she ever secured. In the summer of 18S8 she painted a child's head for a friend, who took the picture to F. A. Stokes Co., to be framed. Mr. Stokes asked permission to correspond with Miss Humphrey, with regard to doing a book for him, which led to the successive years of work for that firm, for the past two years of which the firm had contracts for the sole control of her color work. Although best known as a child painter, she has done considerable work with older subjects, much of it in black and white, and she has lately begun to work for exhibitions in New York and some of the larger cities. The studies of children are done partly from little professional models and partly from her little friends. She works rapidly, catching a little at a time from the children while at play, as a rule. Her home is now in New York.


HUMPHREYS, Mrs. Sarah Gibson, author and woman suffragist, born in southwestern Louisiana, on a sugar plantation, 17th May, 1830. Her father, Hon. Tobias Gibson, was a man of education and advanced ideas. Her mother was Louisiana Breckenridge Hart, of Kentucky, a woman of masculine intellect, unusual culture and SARAH GIBSON HUMPHREYS. great force of character. Until she was fourteen, Mrs. Humphreys' education was supervised by her parents, although the most accomplished teachers were employed to instruct her. At fourteen she was sent to the school of Miss Margaret Mercer, of Loudoun county, Virginia. For three years she studied in the French school of Charles Picot in Philadelphia. Her mother died soon after her return from school, and she assumed the charge of her father's summer home in Lexington, Ky., as well as the winter plantation home in Louisiana, and took the place of her mother in the care and control of six brothers younger than herself, and an infant sister. Two years later she became the wife of Jos. A. Humphreys, of Kentucky, a gentleman of culture and refinement. He died during the war, leaving her with a family of little children to bring up and a large estate to manage unaided. Since her children have been grown and she has been in a measure relieved of financial responsibilities, Mrs. Humphreys has been able to follow her inclination in literary pursuits and the cause of the emancipation of woman. Her first literary work was a novel, which she wrote when only thirteen, and which w;is never published. During the last ten years she has contributed stories, essays, letters and sketches to various magazines and papers north and south, always over a pen-name. One of her contributions to "Bedford's Magazine" was the "Negro Libertines in the South." The most original of Mrs. Humphrey's literary productions is an article read before the Convention of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association on "Man and Woman in the Bible and in Nature," in which she advanced the theory of the sexual duality of God, of the Adam made in His