Nellie Augusta Knopf

Distant View

circa 1925

Housed in a custom hand-carved frame. Outer dimensions measure 18 ½ x 22 ½ x ¾ inches; image size is 11 ¾ x 15 ¾ inches.

About the artist:
As an accomplished woman, artist and educator Nellie Knopf lead a full life made even more remarkable by the fact that she never let the encumbrance of deafness affect her success. Born in Chicago she attended the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied under John Vanderpoel and Frederick Free. In 1900 she graduated with honors. The same year she took a teaching position at Illinois State Woman's College (later MacMurray College). She remained at the college for 43 years eventually becoming the director of the art department.

Nellie did not find the Illinois landscape particularly inspiring and began spending her summers between 1910-1917 studying landscape painting with Charles Woodbury in Maine. She was strongly influenced by the Boston School of painting but by 1915 began painting more impressionistic. Nellie was never a fan of her name as she felt it prevented people from taking her seriously so she began signing her works N.A. Knopf. By the early 1920's she discovered the Rocky Mountains whose scenery enlivened her subject matter. Nellie took a sabbatical to travel out west and during the summer of 1923 she studied with Sven Birger Sandzen and John Fabian Carlson at the Broadmoor Academy in Colorado Springs.

In particular Sandzen’s influence can be seen as she developed her own modernist style with bold colors, loose brush work and heavy impasto."Sandzen's influence can be seen in the almost masculine strength and vigor of Knopf's color and brushwork, although her work always retained an individual touch," Marguerite B. Williams of the Chicago Daily News noted. In 1925 Nellie spent the summer in Glacier Park, Montana, one of the first woman artists to do so. She returned to Colorado and other western states throughout the rest of her lifetime producing many paintings inspired by the scenery. In the 1930's Nellie traveled extensively through Europe but found the way of life not to her liking.

In 1943 she retired from the university and continued her travels out West spending time in Mexico By the time she turned 80 Nellie triumphantly declared "I have done miles of paintings, some of them very good." She moved to Michigan to be near her beloved nephew where she spent the remainder of her life.

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