 Constance Coleman is primarily known as Constance Coleman Richardson
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Constance Coleman Richardson, born in 1905, painted in realist style
American- Scene landscapes of whatever environment and locale she
happened to be in at any given time, including rural Vermont and New
York State, along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, Duluth and
Hastings, Minnesota, or in Lusk, Wyoming. Her emphasis was on the
grandeur of the country and not on industrial ugliness, and many of her
works had luminous effects. She also painted portrait and genre
scenes.
Richardson sometimes worked directly from nature, alla prima, with canvases
completed on the spot, or from oil sketches she later translated into
finished paintings in the studio. She used technical methods she
learned from museum conservationists, and had many opportunities to
associate with museum professionals and be around Old Master paintings
because her husband, Edgar Richardson, was Director of the Detroit
Museum and "one of America's important American art historians and
museum directors" (Rubinstein 239). For the ground of her
paintings later in her career, she prepared gesso, a chalky liquid, from an ancient rabbit
glue recipe given to her by William Sur, the curator of the Frick
Museum. She applied five coats of this mixture to masonite,
allowing long drying periods in between. She allowed the finished
paintings to dry for a year, and then she rubbed them with bread to
remove the shiny parts.
As
a young woman, Constance was
remembered as being strikingly pretty with bright red hair. She
grew up in Irvington, Indiana, a suburb on the east side of
Indianapolis, where her father beginning 1924, was director of the
Indiana State Historical Commission. She was very close to her
father from whom she developed a great love for history. After
graduation from Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, she wanted to go
to art school, but her parents insisted
on a more liberal arts education. The compromise resulted in her
studying at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, for two years,
and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia
from 1925 to 1928. There she met her soon-to-be husband, Edgar
Preston Richardson (1902-1985), marrying him in 1931, when they
moved to Detroit for the next seventeen years where her husband served as
the Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts for the first seventeen
years. He eventually wrote more than twenty books on art history
and as editor of the Art Quarterly,
did many critical reviews. The couple left Detroit in 1962 to
move to Delaware where Edgar Richardson became director of the
Winterthur Museum. From 1966 to 1977, they were in Philadelphia
where he served on the Board of the Pennsylvania Academy and was
President from 1968 to 1969.
As the wife of a prominent art professional, Constance Richardson
performed many social duties, but according to a nephew "was often
impatient with time-consuming proprieties, and could be direct and
uncompromising when it came to safeguarding her working time." (Newton
114) She created a highly organized studio for herself in a spare bedroom,
and painted on a regular schedule, shifting her initial focus from
portraiture to genre and landscapes, especially rivers and prairie
scenes. Of painting landscapes, she said that she had to learn
that herself because academies did not teach landscape
painting. Much of her work was done from sketches she made
from travels during the many
summers she and her
husband spent working quietly in many rural locations across
America.
Richardson
was a prize-winning artist who exhibited widely in galleries and
museums including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, M.H. De
Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, New York City's Macbeth Gallery,
the Kennedy Galleries, New York City and Detroit Institute of Arts.
Her painting Streetlight, based on an Indianapolis summer night street
scene in front of her parent's home on Central Avenue, brought her the
most lasting attention during her career. Ironically it was one of her earliest
paintings. Completed in 1930, while she was a student at the
Pennsylvania Academy, it became the cover illustration of the opening
exhibition catalogue for the National Museum of Women in the Arts in
1987.
Constance Richardson died in 2002 after a long illness. She had given up painting in the 1960s and had a widowhood
of seventeen years, which left her very lonely and sad as she and her
husband had a very close, compatible-seeming marriage and gave each
other plenty of space and encouragement for professional development.
Sources:
Jules and Nancy Heller, North American Women Artists of the 20th Century
Judith Vale Newton and Carole Ann Weiss, Skirting the Issue: Stories of Indiana's Historical Women Artists
Charlotte Rubinstein, American Women Artists
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