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Ad Code: 3
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An example of work by Harriet Blackstone
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A classicist painter, Harriet Blackstone was a descendant of William Blackstone, recalled by history as an 'idealist and solitary', who had settled in Boston before its first group of inhabitants arrived.
She was born in New Hartford, New York, and moved to Chicago with her family in 1883 when she was a teenager. Before turning to art, she was a teacher of elocution and drama at Galesburg, Illinois High School. In 1903, when she was thirty eight, she began the study of art by enrolling at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, and her teacher was William Merritt Chase. Encouraged to get more academic training than what was available in America, she went to Paris to the Academy Julien and studied with Jean Paul Laurens. Her painting "A Crimean" was accepted at the Paris Salon for exhibition in 1907, and this attention brought her attention in America.
On her return, she settled in Glencoe, near Chicago, and became a member of the Chicago Society of Artists, the Arts Club, the Little Room, and the Cordon Club. She had many portrait commissions of prominent persons and exhibited widely including in Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, and at the National Academy, in New York, where she had once lived. She traveled on the East Coast, and destinations included Provincetown and Gloucester, Massachusetts.
However, she tired of society portraiture and turned increasingly to her interest in mysticism and visions. She decided that pursuing this subject matter, a change of course, would be difficult in Chicago, so she moved to New York City in 1920. There she supported herself with portraits but did many paintings of faces she saw in visions.
She died at the age of seventy-five on March 13, 1939, while doing a portrait of James Edwin Miller, a man who walked by her studio frequently when she lived in Glencoe. Her intention was to submit the painting to the 1939 World's Fair competition.
Blackstone has been represented in the National Gallery, Washington, by "Soldat De Crimee"; in the John H. Vanderpoel Art Association, Chicago, by a head, "Dutch Baby"; in the Vincennes Art Museum by The Japanese Prints; by a "Lad in Blue" in the E. H. Young Memorial Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco; in the Chicago Association of Commerce by President Compton; and in many schools and colleges.
Among her portraits are Man With A Cane, a much-exhibited portrait of James Edwin Miller referenced above; Amelita Galli-Curci as Violetta in "La Traviata"; Mrs. F. D. Underwood; the young son of Mr. Ernest Angell; Katherine Ruth Hayman, composer; and Mrs. Edward Gay, wife of the celebrated landscape painter.
Her portraits are often fresh in color and live in handling, with ideal heads and figures, some on mahogany panels. Many have the poetic and spiritual qualities pursued by the modernist school, but with the strength of solid traditional foundation. The surfaces of her later portraits are generally smooth with painstaking technique that produces a delicate elusiveness.
Source:
Cuthbert Lee, "Contemporary American Portrait Painters," Illustrating and Describing the Work of Fifty Living Painters
Marianne Richter,"The Union League Club of Chicago Art Collection"
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