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Ad Code: 3
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An example of work by Gladys Nelson Smith
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born near Chelsea, Aug. 15, 1890; died Kensington, MD, Sept. 15, 1980. Painter, specialized in children. landscapes, portraits. Attended high school in El Dorado. In 1912, enrolled at the University of Kansas, Lawrence under W. A. Griffith. She dropped out of University of Kansas, Lawrence for two years to teach in Jetmore High School, then returned to University of Kansas, Lawrence and graduated in 1918. After graduation she moved to New York where she attended the Art Students League. Lived briefly in Minneapolis, MN and Chicago, IL where she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Moved to Washington, DC in 1924 where she studied at Corcoran School of Art with Edmund C. Tarbell, Richard S. Merryman and Burtis Baker. 200 She established a studio in Washington with a weekend retreat in Frederick County, MD. Moved to Chevy Chase, MD in 1941. | Source:
COLLECTIONS:
Butler Institute of American Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Spencer Museum of Art.
MEMBERSHIPS:
Society of Washington Artists; Art League of Washington.
SOURCES:
Susan Craig, "Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945)"
Kansas Teacher (May 1928); Newlin, Gertrude Dix (Development of Art in Kansas. Typed Manuscript, 1951); Who’s Who in American Art. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1936- v.1=1936-37 v.3= 1941-42 v.2=1938-39 v.4=1940-47. 1-3; Sain, Lydia. Kansas Artists, compiled by Lydia Sain from 1932 to 1948. Typed Manuscript, 1948.; Reinbach, Edna, comp. “Kansas Art and Artists”, in Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society. v. 17, 1928. p. 571-585.; Whittemore, Margaret. “Notes on Some Kansas Artists”, in Kansas Magazine, 1935. p.41-45.; Snow, Florence. “Kansas Art and Artists”, in Kansas Teacher Aug-Sept. 1927, p.18-19; Oct. 1927, p.10, 12; Nov. 1927, p.11-12; Dec. 1927, p.7-8; Jan. 1928, p. 14-15; Feb. 1928, p.20-21; Mar. 1928, p.10-12; Apr. 1928, p. 16-17; May 1928, p.14, 16; June-July 1928, p.13-14.; AskArt, | | This and over 1,750 other biographies can be found in Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945) compiled by Susan V. Craig, Art & Architecture Librarian at University of Kansas. |
Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
|  A painter of landscapes, portraits and genre pictures, Gladys Nelson
Smith was raised on a farm near Chelsea, Kansas. One of ten
children, she began to draw at an early age. In 1912, she
enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where she majored in
fine arts. The faculty, headed by William A. Griffith, had an
Impressionist orientation, and Smith adopted their bright palette and
broad brushwork, applying it to her early landscapes and portraits.
Following her graduation in 1918, the artist married Errett Smith, a
lawyer and fellow University of Kansas alumnus, and moved with him to
Iowa while he trained with the United States Army. After the
armistice, she awaited his return from Europe in New York City.
There, Smith matriculated at the Art Students League and, at one point
during her course of study, attended a lecture given by the New York
Realist, John Sloan, whose work seems to have had an influence on her
development.
Smith’s New York classwork was cut short when she succumbed to the
dreaded influenza of 1918. She developed pneumonia and returned
to Kansas to recuperate. In 1919, Errett Smith was discharged from the
Army, and the young couple moved to Minneapolis. They
subsequently lived in Chicago in 1923, where Smith studied briefly at
the Art Institute; in 1924, they took up permanent residence in
Washington, D.C. From 1924 until 1930, Smith honed her skills at
the Corcoran School of Art under the tutelage of various artists,
including the Boston Impressionist Edmund C. Tarbell. The
Corcoran classes concluded her formal artistic training.
Smith’s exhibition activities began in 1921, when she submitted eight
paintings to the Kansas Free Fair in Topeka. During the 1920s,
she was chiefly admired for her paintings of children. These young
subjects are usually posed with their mothers and are shown chasing
butterflies, flying kites, picking flowers and falling asleep.
Motherhood was a popular subject for a female artist, and Smith’s works
were well received by the critics. “Her composition is exquisite,”
wrote one, “while the theme (child life), which she appears to have
chosen for her life’s work, has a freshness, originality and appeal to
the masses, and is interpreted with so much understanding and
tenderness, that she certainly will, one day, be a sensation in
American art circles” (Simmons, p. 15).
Smith exhibited a figurative work entitled Autumn, “showing
the radiance of light through frosty atmosphere” (Simmons, p. 9) at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1927. A year later, two other figurative
works, Holiday and Morning Sun, were included in the Society of Washington Artists exhibition at what is now called the National Museum of American Art.
Smith continued to receive good reviews throughout the 1920s. In 1930, the Topeka Daily Capital
noted: “Her ability as a landscape painter is second only to that of
painting children. She loves to portray in her own special way
the moods of nature, those subtle qualities in the coming storm, the
roaring wind and the beautiful sunset, which most of us feel but cannot
express” (Simmons, p. 9).
In December 1930, the Smiths departed on a two-month tour of European
museums and galleries, affording the artist a first-hand view of Old
Master paintings.
Although Smith spent her early years in the Midwest, she came to
artistic maturity in the nation’s capital, and her paintings are
strongly linked to that city’s life and landscape. From 1924
until 1930, while attending classes at the Corcoran, Smith lived in a
small apartment in Washington’s northwest section and maintained a
studio at the school. When the weather permitted, she roamed the
city, recording the quaint charms of Georgetown, old Alexandria and
scenes along the C & O Canal and the farmer’s market. Many of
these plein-air sketches were incorporated into finished
paintings. In 1933, the Smiths moved to a renovated carriage
house in Washington’s “Latin Quarter.” The new house was large enough
to accommodate a studio, and Smith soon embarked upon her best and most
productive period.
Smith had begun her art training at a time when the academic tradition
was severely threatened, not only by the Ashcan school, but more
significantly, by the Abstractionists after the revolutionary Armory
Show of 1913. For Smith, steeped in the traditions of the
previous generation, it was natural to continue painting ordinary
people, her relatives and friends.
She had become convinced that portraits were her forte and “gained a
reputation for [genre] portraits of children, which, although
difficult, she found the most enjoyable to create. ‘A child is such
[that] I can put the best of myself in the painting,’” she once told a
dealer (Simmons, p. 10). A work entitled Boy
(Boy With a Drum) won the popular prize at the forty-eighth Anniversary
Exhibition of the Society of Washington Artists in 1939. Lila
Mechlin, art critic for the Washington Star, singled the
picture out for praise. “It has dignity, grace and finish, but it is
vital and atmospheric at the same time” (Simmons, p. 11).
An eighty-six acre, Frederick County, Maryland farm purchased as a
weekend retreat in 1939 became a source for many of Smith’s mid-century
paintings. The Frederick landscapes, executed in a palette of
mossy greens, gray violets and salmon pinks, faithfully capture the
spirit of the land. They are not, however, spontaneous. According
to the artist’s sister, Smith sketched the landscapes in the country,
but completed them in her Washington studio: “She would paint briefly,
perhaps for weeks, on one canvas, put it in a frame and hang it on the
wall, then study it from all angles in order to decide what more needed
doing. The practice–since she might launch a new painting next
morning–explains why so many of her canvases are unsigned. The
signature was seldom added unless a painting was going to exhibition or
was sold” (Nelson, p. 28). The practice also explains why Smith’s
works are rarely, if ever, dated.
In 1941, the Smiths left their downtown address and moved to the
suburbs. Though Smith’s studio was downsized as a result, the
house in Chevy Chase, Maryland offered more space for living and a
neighborhood replete with beautiful trees. Smith’s new life involved
more social commitments, but she still found time to paint: back yards,
front yards, neighbor’s houses, trees in every season. An avid
gardener, Smith had a particular interest in flowers and became known
in the 1940s for her floral still lifes, often created in her own
garden.
During this time, Smith exhibited to increasingly mixed reviews. “She
attributed her lack of recognition to the growing influence of
Modernists,” who she felt were crowding the more traditional artists
out of the market (Simmons, p. 13). In 1953, convinced that her work
had “no chance til this madness [modern art] is over” (Nelson, p. 29),
Smith set her brushes aside and turned her attention to writing, an
interest she had nurtured since her teens. She completed a number of
short stories and poems, none of which were ever published.
Apparently reinspired, Smith built a large studio with a skylight onto
the north side of her Chevy Chase home and resumed painting in
1966. A series of accidents and illnesses followed, however, and
by the fall of 1971, she was an invalid. The loss of her beloved
husband in 1973 left Smith, childless and suffering from glaucoma and
Parkinson’s disease, alone. She died in 1980 at the age of ninety.
Two one-woman exhibitions at commercial galleries in Washington, D.C.
and Frederick, Maryland distinguished Smith’s final year. In
summarizing Smith’s accomplishments, one critic wrote: “Her landscape
compositions tend toward an Impressionist palette, and her figure
compositions, which comprise the best of her work, toward a more
classical use of colors. Some of her still lifes are very bold and
larger than life. . . . She is one of the finest American Realists I
have seen, of the last fifty years” (Simmons, p. 14).
Nancy Rivard Shaw, 2000© Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc.
Sources:
Falk, Peter Hastings. Who Was Who in American Art, 1564-1975. New York City: Sound View Press, 1999.
McMahan, Virgil E. Artists Born Before 1900: A Biographical Directory. Washington, D.C.: 1976.
Simmons, Linda Crocker, with an appreciation by Josephine Nelson. Gladys Nelson Smith. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1984. |
Biography from Newman Galleries:
| A painter of landscapes, portraits, and genre pictures, Gladys Nelson
Smith was raised on a farm near Chelsea, Kansas. She began to
draw at an early age, and in 1912 matriculated at the University of
Kansas, where she majored in fine art. In 1918 she married a
fellow classmate and followed him to various locations. In 1924,
the couple settled in Washington, D.C., and Smith refined her skills at
the Corcoran School of Art.
Although Smith spent her early
life in the Midwest, she came to artistic maturity in the nation's
capital, and her paintings are strongly identified with its life and
landscape. In the 1920s, she was chiefly admired for her paintings of
children. In the 1930s she recorded the quaint charms of
Georgetown and other local scenery. In 1936 the Smiths bought an
86-acre farm in Frederick County, Maryland, which became their weekend
retreat. It was used in many of Smith's subsequent landscapes.
An
avid gardener, Smith had a particular interest in flowers and became
known in the 1940s for her floral still lifes, often studied in her own
garden. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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