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About Anna ELizabeth Klumpke:
The painting was inspired by Emile Zola’s novel The Dream (Le rLve).1 A mother and her daughter sit by an open window working on embroidering a cross of an altar cloth. In the lower left-hand corner we see an open book, which is the Archbishop of Genoa, Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend, a popular source book for Christian iconography, written in the thirteenth century. Next to the book is a basket with spools of gold cord and bobbins of silk. The daughter Angélique stares out the window at a Gothic cathedral, dreaming of marrying a handsome prince. As described by Britta C. Dwyer, who reproduced The Dream on the cover of her monograph on Klumpke, the "outline of her soft profile is silhouetted against a dark brown interior; her blonde hair, wispy around her forehead, is drawn up in a knot on the crown of her head. She wears a pale blue dress and a matching apron with a gauzy white shawl across her shoulders. The walls are grayish white, bare except for a small crucifix."2 Perhaps Anna was thinking of her childhood in Paris when she and her sisters sat around a large table, focused on sewing. One of her sisters would read aloud.
After having been exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1891,3 the painting became part of a one-woman show at the St. Botolph Club in Boston a year later, one of thirty-eight oils and pastels. Following the show, six oils were sold and the artist received several commissions. Boston reviewers were impressed by Klumpke’s Parisian training. One praised her for her "fine perception of people and things." But the same critic found The Dream to be lacking in dramatic feeling, despite the excellent craftsmanship. On the other hand, the demanding jury in Paris had accepted the painting. In the Boston Evening Transcript (16 Jan. 1892) a critic stated that the portrait of the artist’s mother could "hardly be too highly commended."
Born in San Francisco in 1856, Anna became enamored by the celebrated French animal painter Rosa Bonheur, a giant among woman painters. Anna’s mother arranged for her to study in Switzerland, then the family moved to Paris. Anna executed a copy of Rosa Bonheur’s Plowing in Nivernais in the Musée du Luxembourg. The picture became for her a talisman. In 1882 she entered the Académie Julian to study under Jules-Joseph Lefebvre and Tony Robert-Fleury. Right away, Klumpke’s works were accepted in the Paris Salon, beginning with An Eccentric in 1882. By 1885 she received an Honorable Mention for a portrait and three years later, a medal at the Julian Academy. In 1886, Klumpke visited Italy. Two years later she painted In the Wash House, signed and dated "Paris 1888," which is in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy. It won the Academy’s Temple Gold Medal. When exhibited at the Paris Salon, the painting was noticed by Sara Hallowell, the representative from the Art Institute of Chicago (instrumental in introducing French impressionism to the Midwest), who saw to it that the work was exhibited in the Windy City as well. Klumpke won a bronze medal for a portrait of a fashionable society lady at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889 (no. 185). That year she painted the fine portrait of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (National Portrait Gallery). Klumpke’s Portrait of Miss M.D. was on view at the Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 18934 and in 1904 at the St. Louis Universal Exposition, Klumpke exhibited a Portrait of Rosa Bonheur and Maternal Affection. The latter may have been Maternal Instruction, painted in 1891, a delightful plein air mother and child scene, now in the New Hampshire Historical Society.
Klumpke met Bonheur in 1889 at her château. The two kept up a lively correspondence after Klumpke returned for a while to Boston. She even went out of her way to gather samples of fresh sagebrush, which she shipped to Bonheur, to be used for her painting Wild Horses Fleeing from a Prairie Fire.5 Later in 1898 Klumpke requested to execute Rosa Bonheur’s portrait, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Klumpke moved in with Bonheur that year, and upon the older painter’s death (1899), inherited her estate, including a château, where she remained for the next thirty years. Bonheur’s oeuvre was sold by Galerie Georges Petit in 1900. She worked on a biography in French of Bonheur (published in 1908) and opened the château during the war years to be used as a hospital. Nearby, also working in the war-relief effort was Sara Hallowell, her old agent in Chicago. After the war, Klumpke continued to be successful. Klumpke received the cross of the Legion of Honor in 1936. She moved back to San Francisco where she was nominated one of California’s most distinguished women artists in 1940, the year in which she published her memoirs. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has her painting from 1910 entitled The Breeze and The Artist’s Father (1912). Klumpke died in 1942.
LITERATURE:
Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, Memoirs of an Artist (Boston: 1940).
Eleanor Tufts, American Women Artists 1830-1930 (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987), cat. nos. 13, 47).
*Britta C. Dwyer, Anna Klumpke: A Turn-of-the-Century Painter and Her World (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999).
Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston (Boston: MFA, 2001).
General References: PAFA Exhibition Record; CAI Exhibition Record; NAD Exhibition Record 1889-1898; Boston 1892-1898; Petteys, Dictionary of Women Artists, 1985, p. 400; Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California 1786-1940, p. 258.
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Paintings by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke
| Reverie |
| oil on canvas:51 1/2 x 32 5/8 in |
| signed lower right |
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Click Picture to Enlarge
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