Page:Woman in Art.djvu/160

WOMAN IN ART cropped out now and again and worked from nature with comparatively little instruction. So worked Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School; and so worked Jean Francois Millet in the little obscure village the world knows as Barbizon. The great landscape painters of the world have been sincere students of nature, plus their own individuality, so strongly marked in the paintings of our George Inness.

Annie Cornelia Shaw was born in Troy, New York, September 16, 1852. Her first studio was in the Metropolitan Block, Chicago, 1870. Her first and only teacher seems to have been Mr. C. H. Ford of Chicago. She had a studio in New York in 1881, and was in a Boston studio in 1884-5. She was elected Associate Member of the Chicago Academy of Design in 1873, and an Academician in 1876, and an honorary member of the Art Institute in 1886, also honorary member of the Bohemian Club of Chicago. Miss Shaw was an exhibitor at the Columbian Fair, 1893, also at the Art Institute the same year, and at the Academy of Design, New York, and the New York Water Color Society.

Her work was represented in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and in the Cincinnati Gallery, etc.

There was characteristic naturalness in her paintings that was most attractive, and most promising for future greatness. Some of her principal works were bought by Walter C. Larned of Lake Forest, Illinois, Mr. Haskell of Boston, A. A. Munger, Messrs. Cunningham and Butterfield, of Chicago, and Mr. George Bracket of Minneapolis.

Her last works were painted in 1887, and her life's work ended before she was thirty-five; she died in 1887, and left about two hundred and fifty canvases in oil and forty-five water colors, beside a goodly number sold; they were choice, showing careful study and masterly handling. Her twenty or thirty studies of clouds are charming, and her method of such work reminds one of the method and studies of similar subjects by Sir Alfred East. Nature was her teacher, and her thought entered into her subjects, as a list of a few of her pictures will show. Her love of the "Morgendämmerung" is emphasized in "While the Morn is New," in which she comes close to the atmosphere and mystery of the hour. "In the Twilight," "Shadows on the Hill," "Night is Descending," "Foggy Day at Gloucester," "Willow Brook," "The Peacefulness of Nature," and "The Oak" are full of interest and most 124