In the early 1900s, Susan Watkins was a breath away from becoming a rare woman art star. If she had lived longer, she might have earned the fame of Mary Cassatt, another American painter in France, like Watkins.
A major exhibition of Watkins’ work opens Friday at the Chrysler Museum of Art.
Much of her work on display is from the Norfolk museum’s collection because of a prominent Norfolk banker, Goldsborough Serpell, who courted Watkins for many years. She finally agreed to marry him 17 months before she died, in 1913, at age 38.
She left him all of her art, most of which he bequeathed to the museum in 1946.
As posthumous fates go, Watkins was lucky. Art by another almost-famous woman painter of her day, Ellen Emmet Rand, is scarce because her family tossed it in a barn and left it to rot, wrote scholar Alexis L. Boylan for the exhibition’s catalog.
By contrast, the Norfolk museum retained Watkins’ work and mounted shows through the years. This latest effort stands out because it places the artist in context with her times. Other women painters, such as Rand, are part of the narrative, which illuminates the relevant facts of her era.
“Susan Watkins and Women Artists of the Progressive Era” was organized by Corey Piper, the museum’s former Brock Curator of American Art. After eight years at the Chrysler, he started in July as a curator for Richmond’s Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Watkins has been little known outside of the Norfolk museum. “The more time I spent with the collection, I was struck by how powerful her work was,” Piper said.
He planned for the show to open this year, the 150th anniversary of her birth. Piper had two major goals with the exhibition.
“First and foremost is to restore the story of Susan Watkins to the history of American art. But also, not to tell her story in isolation.”
Piper wanted “to establish she was part of a much larger phenomenon of American women who were accessing the professional art world in ways that may not have seemed possible a generation before.”
Women were not widely welcomed into the art world, but there were gateways. Watkins made all the right moves.
She was born in 1875 into a privileged family in California. In 1890, her father moved them to New York City for his new job.
At age 15, she enrolled at the Art Students League, a school that was open-minded about women. After mastering the basics, Watkins joined the women’s life drawing class. That meant drawing nude models, training that was key to developing the skill she needed to paint realistic portraits.
One of her teachers, revered painter William Merritt Chase, encouraged her and became her lifelong friend.
After her father’s sudden death, she and her mother moved to Paris in 1897. She studied there and by 1899 was showing in the all-important Paris Salon. In 1901, she won a top medal for her painting “The 1830 Girl.”
She experimented with Impressionism in Paris, but built her reputation on an academic style — realistic interiors and figures captured in smooth, blended brushstrokes. Women artists remaining in France, such as Cassatt, were freer to exhibit work in an avant-garde style such as Impressionism. Watkins wanted to succeed in America, which meant sticking to a conservative approach.
Word got back to the United States about how well she was doing overseas. Chase’s wife sent her a letter stating that her husband had told a group of artists that “he considered (you) ‘the best woman painter living’ and he meant it.”
She returned to New York City in 1910 and that year won a National Academy of Design prize for best painting or sculpture by an American woman. Portrait commissions flooded in.
Sadly, her career was eclipsed by illness, possibly cancer, Piper said. Once married, in January 1912, she resumed exhibiting in New York City, Chicago and Philadelphia. She may have made art in Norfolk, but no existing works indicate that, he said.
Soon after she died, in June 1913, Chase made a stately portrait of Watkins. Serpell purchased it and displayed it in a place of honor in the family mansion in Ghent.
By his project’s end, Piper saw that it was about a community of gifted women artists, many of whom were less documented than Watkins.
Pegging her as the next Cassatt seemed irrelevant compared to looking at the system and attitudes that suppressed such women’s careers.
As a result, Piper has adopted a mission: “To try and help fewer artists fall through the cracks.”
Chrysler admission is free. Visit chrysler.org for more information.