INTERNATIONAL
• STUDIO
VOL. LIX. No. 233 Copyright, 1916, by John Lane Company JULY, 1916

iNNE GOLDTHWAITE AS A POR-
/V TRAIT PAINTER
\ BY A. D. DEFRIES
In the Encyclopaedia Britannica the
article on women is very much shorter than the ar-
ticle on wood carving, and the reference to women’s
art is insignificant. “ Increasing provision has been
made for decorative work, silver-smiths, dentists,
law-copyists and plan tracing.” The Encyclopae-
dia, like every government and academy has to be
at least one generation out of date, and so here
we get a very good idea of the attitude toward
the art of women fifty years ago.
In spite of isolated women artists in the past
it is not too much to say that this generation is
the first to develope the fine arts in women. The
result is a flood of feminine art, most of which
has very little true art in it; it is not often worse
than that of the opposite sex, but so far it has
not reached the great heights attained by the
Masters (unless you except Rosa Bonheur?).
Nevertheless in every country women’s work is
infinitely finer and more creative than that of all
the chiefs among the men.
An Englishwoman, Mrs. Sargeant Florence,
possibly the first woman mural-decorator, who
was in 1891 awarded the Dodge prize at the New
York academy, said to me:
“The women of my generation are the pioneers
of woman’s art. . . . We are the ones who are
clearing the way for the generation to come. No
one knows better than I the limitations of my
own work ... but it is because the energy,
time, imagination and physical strength that men
use freely for their art has in my case had to go
in ceaseless struggling ... in my'case not for
money only, but for the ‘right to work.’”
She belongs to the generation of our mothers,
and already we are benefiting by their efforts.

To-day in England, of the forty-nine members of
the New English Art Club, seven are women;
The International Society (founded by Whistler
and with Rodin now for president) has four women
members. In Paris and Glasgow the work of a
few women is regularly purchased for the Public
Galleries; in Pittsburg and other American
cities also; and women artists in general get
better treatment in America and in France than
they receive in England, Germany or Italy.
In the Anglo-American exhibit at the White
City in 1914, the two best pictures from a femi-
nine hand came from two Englishwomen: Lily
Defries and Alice Fanner. Certainly the best
miniaturist is an Englishwoman—Gertrude
Thompson—the last of the Pre-Raphaelites—who
is painting in a thoroughly modern and individual
way. Ethel Gabain, also a Britisher, is the best
woman lithographer in the Senefelder Club, and
Beatrice Howe is preferred by most Paris critics
to the American, Elizabeth Nourse, who also in-
terests herself in painting peasants and babies.
Both those artists are represented in the Luxem-
bourg, as is also the French woman, Gaultier
Bossiere, who only turned seriously to art after
her children grew up, and is a fine flower painter.
Of all the women portraitists in Paris in 1914 I
thought the chief was Olga de Boznanska, a
Pole. In the salon of that year she and Beatrice
Howe stood out as the equal of the men: both
totally different from each other and expressing
at the same time an essentially feminine point
of view with a very vigorous and simple technique
which shirked nothing and knew much. Olga de
Boznanska is the only woman whose name is
written up on the board among the professors at
the atelier in the rue de la Grande Chaumiere:
but in America women get more easily into the
professorial posts.
But of all the women’s art that I have seen—

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