Elizabeth Nourse

American, 1860 - 1938

Birth-PlaceMount Healthy, Ohio

Death-PlaceFrance, Paris

BiographyElizabeth Nourse (1859-1938)

Elizabeth Nourse and her twin sister, Adelaide, were born in Mount Healthy, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, in 1859, six years after the birth of their older sister, Louise. Their parents, Elizabeth LeBreton Rogers and Caleb Elijah Nourse, were descendants of French Huguenots and had converted to Roman Catholicism shortly after their marriage. At the age of fifteen, Elizabeth began art studies at the McMicken School of Design (later the Art Academy of the Cincinnati Art Museum). During her seven years at the school, she studied drawing, watercolor, oil painting, wood carving, painting on china, and sculpture. Although she did not study with Frank Duveneck, Cincinnati's most famous teacher, Nourse became aware of Duveneck's influence and began to incorporate his rich painterly technique into her work.

After the marriage of her twin and the death of her parents in 1882, Nourse went to New York and studied with William Sartain. She returned to Cincinnati the following year and began to support herself by selling her work. In 1887 Nourse and her sister Louise traveled to Paris, where Nourse studied for three months with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian and received advice from Jean-Jacques Henner and Carolus-Duran on the side. Her painting “La Mère” (private collection), was accepted at the Paris Salon of 1888, and Nourse became established at the Salon as a painter of peasant women and children.

After settling in France, Nourse returned to the United States only once, in 1893, to visit her family and see the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During her life, Nourse traveled (often in the company of Louise) to Russia, Italy, Austria, Holland, North Africa, and Spain. Summers were usually spent in either Brittany, Normandy, or Saint Léger-en-Yvelines, near Paris. She maintained an active exhibition schedule, sending paintings to major exhibitions in France and abroad until her retirement in 1924. She lived with and supported Louise throughout her life, passing away only one year after her.

Head of an Algerian (Moorish Prince), ca. 1898
Oil on canvas, 32 x 23 3/4 in. (81.3 x 60.3 cm)
Signed and inscribed (upper left): To my dear friend Mr. Barnhorn / E. Nourse. Paris.
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1981.68)

Nourse called North Africa "the land of sunshine and flowers and lovely Arabs" when she traveled there during the winter of 1897-98 with her sister Louise. (1) The sisters chose their destination at the suggestion of their Cincinnati friends Henriette and Laura Wachman, who had ventured to this exotic locale several years earlier. Attracted by the brightly colored costumes of the natives, Nourse spent a productive three months in Tunisia and neighboring Algeria. “Head of an Algerian” was probably created during a side trip from Tunis to the Algerian city of Biskra. (2)

“Head of an Algerian” is the strongest and most dramatic of Nourse's North African subjects. The painting depicts a traditionally costumed and confidently posed young African who rests one hand firmly on his hip and holds a cigarette in the other. He wears a white turban around his head and several layers of clothing wrapped loosely around his body. Blue, green, and yellow fabrics add color accents to his essentially monochromatic robe, and a vivid red waistband contributes an especially bright note.

Nourse placed her model against a rich blue background and painted him with thick bravura brushstrokes. This technique undoubtedly derived from her training in Cincinnati, where Munich-trained Frank Duveneck had introduced a taste for both picturesque subject matter and rapid painterly execution. Duveneck's influence pervaded the work of Nourse's contemporaries, and his painting “Study for the Guard of the Harem” (1879; private collection, on loan to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) makes a compelling comparison to Nourse's North African work.

Oriental subjects were especially popular in France during the second half of the nineteenth century as France celebrated its imperialistic claims to the natural and human resources of its North African colonies. Nourse’s North African subjects were well received in her adopted French home, and she exhibited them at both the Salon and the Societé des Orientalistes.
Nourse inscribed “Head of an Algerian” "To my dear friend Mr. Barnhorn" and gave the work to her Cincinnati colleague Clement J. Barnhorn. Barnhorn had been one of Nourse's classmates at the McMicken School of Design. A noted sculptor and later the head of the sculpture department at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Barnhorn arrived in Paris on a scholarship in 1895. Nourse painted a portrait of her friend (1895; Cincinnati Art Museum) that year as a token of her esteem. (3) Barnhorn returned to Cincinnati in 1900, taking “Head of an Algerian” with him, and loaned it to the “Twenty-Eighth Annual Exhibition of American Art,” held at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1921.

MEB

Bibliography:
Mary Alice Heekin Burke, “Elizabeth Nourse, 1859-1938: A Salon Career” (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983).

NOTES:
. Elizabeth Nourse to her niece, Mary Nourse, February 1 and 10, 1898, quoted in Burke, “Elizabeth Nourse”, p. 54.
2. Ibid., p. 55.
3. Millard F. Rogers Jr. et al., “The Golden Age: Cincinnati Painters of the Nineteenth Century Represented in the Cincinnati Art Museum”, exhib. cat., (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1979), pp. 55, 91.

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