Louise Herreshoff

Louise Chamberlain Herreshoff (November 29, 1876 – May 14, 1967) was an American painter and collector of porcelain.

Born in Brooklyn, Herreshoff was the only child of a prominent Rhode Island family; at her mother's death when she was four she was taken in by her aunts in Providence to be raised. At the age of six she began art classes with Mary C. Wheeler while attending the Lincoln School, from which she graduated in 1890. Wheeler was famous for taking her students to Europe for summer study, and on one of these visits, in 1895, Herreshoff met Raphaël Collin at Fontenay-aux-Roses. He would become her teacher for the next two summers. In 1898 she moved permanently to France to study with Collin, taking the time while there to make sketching and painting visits elsewhere around the continent. In 1899 she enrolled at the Académie Julian, where she was taught by Jean-Paul Laurens – whose use of color came to have a strong influence on her own style^[1] – and by Benjamin Constant.^[2] Her 1899 painting Le Repos was accepted into the 1900 Paris Salon, and that same year An Interior was shown at the National Academy of Design. Herreshoff returned to the United States in 1903, in which year she showed paintings at the Rhode Island School of Design. Until 1910 she split her time between Providence and New York, summering along the New England coast. In the latter year she married an employee of General Electric, Charles Eaton, and moved to Schenectady, New York with him, but after three months they separated and she returned to Providence to live with her mother's sister, Elizabeth Dyer, whom she considered a surrogate mother. Between 1921 and 1925 she continued exhibiting, showing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Watercolor Club, the North Shore Art Association in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the Providence Art Club.^[1] Her style has been described as Fauvist.^[2]

Herreshoff's aunt died in 1927, and it was this event that apparently caused her to cease painting; she spent the next forty years collecting porcelain, and packed her paintings away in the attic of her Providence home.^[3] At sixty-six, in 1941, she took as her husband the thirty-eight-year-old Euchlin D. Reeves, a graduate of Washington and Lee University School of Law^[1] whom she had med at a meeting of a ceramic collectors' club.^[4] The pairing, which at least one writer has suggested was based on a shared love of collecting rather than any romantic attachment,^[5] was described as "a fragile union";^[6] so great was the couple's love of acquisition that eventually they filled an entire house with furniture and porcelain, and purchased another next door into which they could expand. This house, too, was eventually filled.^[5] The two remained married until Euchlin's death in January 1967. Herreshoff followed later that year, and bequeathed the collection, now numbering over 2,000 pieces of Chinese export porcelain as well as British and Continental European examples,^[4] to Washington and Lee University;^[1] the movers who came to take the porcelain were surprised by the paintings, and only saved them for use of the frames.^[3] The Reeves Collection has since grown to encompass work from Asia, Europe, and the Americas,^[7] and today contains over four thousand objects.^[4]

In 1976 Herreshoff's work was shown in an exhibition co-sponsored by the university and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, bringing it to a wider public. One of her pieces, Poppies of c. 1920, was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987.^[1] The story of Herreshoff and Reeves is the subject of the book A Fragile Union: The Story of Louise Herreshoff by James W. Whitehead, the curator who helped to bring their art collection to Washington and Lee.^[8] Its forward was written by Tom Wolfe, who has also discussed her paintings.^[9]

Herreshoff and Reeves are buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.^[10][11]

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