Anne Ramsdell Congdon
Chrysanthemums, 1900
Signed and dated lower right
Watercolor on paper
26 x 19 inch
Provenance
Matthew O'Connell, Gloucester, Massachusetts
Anne Ramsdell Congdon studied art at a young age in Worcester. Originally a watercolorist, she attended the Académie de Lécluse in Paris in 1891, and later with Rhoda Holmes Nichols (1854–1938), an assistant to William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), at a summer extension to Chase’s Shinnecock School of Art in Oguinquit, Maine. She also studied with Boston and Oguinquit marine painter and etcher Charles H. Woodbury (1864–1940), who taught his students to “paint in verbs, not nouns,” thus advocating the quick stroke of a brush.
She was active in Nashua as a watercolorist until she married a New Hampshire surgeon and Nantucket native, Dr. Charles E. Congdon, in 1902. She reportedly suspended her art career to maintain an antiques shop in Nashua, her birthplace, while raising two sons.
By the mid-1920s, she was attending the summer classes in oil painting with Frank Swift Chase (1886-1958) on Nantucket, and she rapidly became a plein air painter in the bold style of her new mentor. The Boston Herald observed, “Her work is direct, facile, and without mannerisms.” She painted a series of waterfront paintings...
Category
Early 1900s American Impressionist Still-life Drawings and Watercolors
MaterialsPaper, Watercolor
