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 CHAPTER XV

First Recognized American Women Painters.

Vinnie Reams Hoxie was the first American girl to gain recognition in the art world with her brush. We know little of her early life, nor was she prolific with her painting. We have an example of her work that shows decided talent, a picture of charming naturalness—a child at the edge of a wood is followed by her kitten. The little girl is out at the toes and minus her hose, but she is a dainty maid, native to her surroundings, and as free from self-consciousness as her kitten. The picture is painted with far more freedom and purer color than was usual with the men painters of her time.

Here was a small beginning, but it was woman's beginning in the field of American Art.

In 1869 she went to Italy, and the result of her study there is noted in another chapter.

During the next twenty-five years few if any women exhibited paintings in the National Academy of Design in New York, or in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. But a few had the impetus and instinct for art, and like bulbs beneath the Winter snows were persistently growing toward the season of buds and blossoms; and as the reasonsseasons [sic] rotate, so came their time for flowering.

The first painters in America, like the first discoverers, carpenters, and farmers, came with more or less talented souls from over seas. We all feel that Scotland might have become an art center if eight or ten of her artist sons had not migrated to the New World, unconsciously to help in the cultivation of native talent that began to show signs of art instinct, from Boston to Philadelphia.

Women were too busy with practicalities incidental to new homes and new families to spend time and thought on non-essentials. Time had rolled along till the calendar indicated 1820, in which year a little girl was born in Ireland, where she lived till 1836, when, like the painter-men who came before her, she took ship for America. We know not what circumstances brought Mrs. Eliza Greatorex, but we do know that she studied with William and James Hart in New York, under Lambinet in Paris, also at the Pinakothek in Munich. In 1857 she visited England, and five years later spent a summer in France, Germany, and Italy, another in old Nuremberg, and 1871 in Ober Ammergau. In 1872 she returned to New York to spend the summer 117