By Alice Barber Stephens
Located in Miami, FL
Female Illustrator of the Golden Age Alice Barber Stephens renders in an academic style and women sitting in a chair and responding to something outside of the frame.
Signed lower left. Most likely done for a major newsstand magazine like Harper's, Century or Scribner's Monthly.
Work is framed under glass in a simple black wood frame. Perhaps period. Matt is new. Frame size: 20.5 x 14.5
From: Wikipedia
Alice Barber Stephens (July 1, 1858 – July 13, 1932) was an American painter and engraver, best remembered for her illustrations. Her work regularly appeared in magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and The Ladies Home Journal.
Early life and education
Alice Barber was born near Salem, New Jersey. She was the eighth of nine children born to Samuel Clayton Barber and Mary Owen, who were Quakers.
She attended local schools until she and her family moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At age 15 she became a student at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art & Design), where she studied wood engraving.
The Women's Life Class (1879), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
She was admitted to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876 (the first year women were admitted), studying under Thomas Eakins. Among her fellow students at the Academy were Susan MacDowell, Frank Stephens, David Wilson Jordan, Lavinia Ebbinghausen, Thomas Anshutz, and Charles H. Stephens (whom she would marry). During this time, at the academy, she began to work with a variety of media, including black-and-white oils, ink washes, charcoal, full-color oils, and watercolors. In 1879, Eakins chose Stephens to illustrate an Academy classroom scene for Scribner's Monthly. The resulting work, Women's Life Class, was Stephens' first illustration credit.
New Woman
As educational opportunities were made more available in the nineteenth century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior by the art world, and to help overcome that stereotype women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman". Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives."
Alice Barber Stephens, The Women Business, oil, 1897, Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
One example of overcoming women stereotypes was Stephens' Woman in Business from 1897, which showed how women could focus not only in the home, but also in the economic world.[8] As women began to work, their career choices broadened and illustration became a commendable occupation. People's ideas about education and art started to merge, and the outcome of a certain sensitivity to the arts began to be seen as uplifting and educational. By using illustration as a means to further their practices, women were able to fit the traditional gender role while still being active in their pursuits for the "New Woman". According to Rena Robey of Art Times, "The early feminists began to leave the home to participate in clubs as moral and cultural guardians, focused on cleaning up cities and helping African Americans, impoverished women, working children, immigrants, and other previously ignored groups." Stephens took advantage of the explosion of illustration opportunities, including the opportunity to work from home.
Women's education
Edwin Forrest House, formerly the home of the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.
Throughout the period before the civil war, textile and other decorative work became acceptable occupations for those who aspired to be in the middle class. The Philadelphia School of Design for Women, founded in 1848 by Sarah Worthington Peter was first among a group of women's design schools established in the 1850s and 1860s; others appeared in Boston, New York, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. It began as a charitable effort to train needy and deserving young women in textile and wallpaper design, wood engraving, and other salable artistic skills, providing a means for training women who needed wage work.
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) was established in 1805 by painter and scientist Charles Willson Peale, sculptor William Rush...
Category
Early 1900s Academic Art by Medium: Charcoal
