ARTIST: Blanche Chloe Grant (New Mexico, Nebraska, 1874 - 1948)
NAME: Portrait of Sarah Roberts Wallbaum
MEDIUM: oil on canvas
CONDITION: Restretched. Missing a few flakes of paint. Some small scattered inpaintings/touch ups.
SIGHT SIZE: 30 x 24 1/2 inches / 76 x 63 cm
FRAME SIZE: 33 x 28 inches / 83 x 71 cm
SIGNATURE: on verso
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 121578
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BIOGRAPHY:
Painter, illustrator, educator and writer, Blanche Chloe Grant arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1916 to fill a teaching position at the University of Nebraska School of Fine Arts. She was replacing Sara Shewell Hayden, who had been on the faculty for seventeen years. Blanche had credentials of sophisticated eastern art education and professional accomplishments as a painter and illustrator, and she received welcoming attention including this Omaha World-Herald newspaper article Special Dispatch,' June 16, 1916:"Miss Blanche Chloe Grant has been appointed associate professor of drawing and painting for the state university. She is a graduate of Vassar College, and has taken work in The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Boston School of Fine Arts, paying special attention to illustrating. She will commence her duties at the University in September, giving courses in illustrating, the history of recent painting and drawing."Before moving to Nebraska, Blanche had ties to the Midwest through her birthplace and early home in Leavenworth, Kansas, where she was the oldest of three girls of Mary and Willard Webster Grant. Both parents were from New York, and Willard Grant, was an 1869 graduate of Harvard University. On Leavenworth census records, he was listed as a "teacher," but no details are given as to why a Harvard educated man would be teaching on the frontier. A guess is that he had been sent out by the government to conduct classes for soldiers at Fort Leavenworth. During the frontier period, this Fort was referred to as the '?education fort' because it was the Army's major center for training and schooling soldiers and surveyors of the West, and also for harboring and guiding immigrant travelers. By age eight, Blanche had moved with her family to Indianapolis, where she remained through her teen years and attended the local high school, which her father served as Principal.During the next two decades, she acquired the prestigious education mentioned in the Omaha World-Herald article. Among her teachers were William Paxton, Philip Leslie Hale, Henry McCarter, Francis Lamb and William Merritt Chase. She spent four months studying in Europe; and then had studios for working in Philadelphia as a landscape painter, Wilmington as a magazine illustrator affiliated with Howard Pyle, and New York City doing book and magazine illustration.Although Blanche Grant was brought to Nebraska to teach art at the University, she like most of the other faculty had considerable distraction during that time-period because of World War I, which had begun in Europe in 1914. When she arrived in Lincoln in 1916, United States entry into the war was imminent, and the University campus was having one of the most contentious periods since its founding in 1869. Verbal and physical fights broke out over issues of patriotism of German-Americans, of faculty members, who, to keep their jobs, were required to declare in writing their allegiance to America. And classes were disrupted by loud and continuous marching on campus of members of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). In 1918, hardship continued after the was when the Spanish Flu epidemic killed over 600,000 Americans including several thousand Nebraskans.At that time, Blanche applied for a passport, and in 1919, took a six-months leave of absence from the University with a job in Le Mans, France as a YMCA Secretary. Her motives were unknown, but this trip abroad became the end of her time in Nebraska. By 1920, having spent only about three years working in the state, she settled in the art colony of Taos, New Mexico. This place, dominated by the culture of Southwest Indian and Spanish inhabitants, was being 'discovered' by many Caucasian artists and writers. For Blanche and others, it offered a relatively peaceful, cultured and isolated existence-a marked contrast to the life she had led in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Taos, Blanche spent as much time on writing as on painting, and her subjects in both activities were the varied populace and culture of New Mexico with emphasis on the "romantic and colorful side of life in Taos." (Kovinick 116)She was a member of the Taos Art Association; editor of the Taos Valley News; and wrote books, which did not become big sellers but which remain valuable records of New Mexico of that era: When Old Trails Were New, The Story of Taos (1934), Taos Indians (1925), Taos Today (1925) and Dona Lona (1941. She spent years doing research on Kit Carson, but did not complete the book, leaving her papers to M. Morgan Estergreen, who used them for writing and publishing of his book, Kit Carson: A Portrait in Courage.After moving away, Blanche participated in a 1922 exhibition in Nebraska. The Second Annual Exhibition of the Omaha Society of Fine Arts, listed two paintings by Blanche Grant: On a Taos Threshold and War Bonnets. Other exhibition activity included her entries in the First Traveling Exhibition of Western Painters, 1922 - 1923; and shows at the Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe in 1925 and 1928.Paintings by Blanche are in the collection of the Museum of the Southwest in Los Angeles, and Harwood Foundation and County Courthouse in Taos. She also completed a mural for the Taos Community Church. Her papers and photographs for an unpublished study of the state of New Mexico are in the Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Harvard University.Blanche Chloe Grant died at age 74 in 1948 in Taos, where she is buried at Sierra Vista Cemetery.