Letta Crapo Smith

(Michigan, 1862-1921)

Untitled (Woman Seated in the Shade)

Oil on canvas

22" x 16"

An oil on canvas of a picnic or garden scene, with a woman on a rocking chair, shaded by a tree. Signature to the bottom left corner. The frame measures 28" x 22 1/4".

Letta Crapo Smith studied with at the Academie Julian in Paris with the likes of William Merritt Chase, Julius Rolshoven, and George Hitchcock, and spent her career traveling and painting in Japan and across Europe. She was President of the Detroit Society of Woman Painters, and notably, she had a work accepted by the Paris Salon. Smith's most famous painting, "The First Birthday," received the bronze medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and would later hang in the Louvre. Today, her works may be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Flint Institute of Arts, and Wheaton College.

The canvas has been lined and re-stretched on a later , with the edge of the original canvas visible just inside the right of the frame's sight edge. Some areas of fine craquelure to the paint layer, which is not very visually distracting.