Guda was a 12th-century nun and illuminator from Germany. She created a self-portrait in an initial letter in the Homiliary of St. Bartholomew. Because of humility, most nuns that worked as illuminators, didn't signed the manuscripts they illuminated. She did. But her inscription says: "Guda, a sinner, wrote and painted this book.".
Jessie Marion King, known as Jessie M. King, (1875-1949) was a Scottish illustrator and designer. Born into a strict family who disproved of her art as a child, she found solace in the family houskeper, who become her second mother. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art (1892–1899). She is known for her illustrated children's books. She frequently depicted ethereal "wan haloed knights" and pale ladies draped in stars, influenced by her lifelong belief in fairies.
She also designed bookplates, jewellery and fabric, and painted pottery. Jessie was one of the artists known as the Glasgow Girls. She was described in 1927 in the Aberdeen Press and Journal as "the pioneer of batik in Great Britain".
This remarkable Art Nouveau drawing by Jessie M. King was the frontispiece design for ‘L’Evangile de L’Enfance’, for which she designed the binding and illustrations circa 1902. The book was entered as part of the Scottish Section of the 1902 International Exhibition of Decorative Art in Turin, which was organised by Fra Newbery, director of The Glasgow School of Art and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The binding, a striking Art Nouveau design tooled in gilt on white vellum, was executed by the Glasgow bookbinders, MacLehose and won the coveted Gold Medal for bookbinding at the exhibition. The certificate was made out to ‘Signor Jessie King’ such was the assumption that a man would be the recipient of the award. This success however brought with it a raft of publicity and commissions as articles about Jessie’s work appeared in art journals around Europe.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun (1755-1842) was a French painter who mostly specialized in portrait painting. Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style. Her subject matter and color palette can be classified as Rococo, but her style is aligned with the emergence of Neoclassicism. She was born in Paris to successful fashionable hairdresser Jeanne Maisin and Louis Vigée, a portraitist and pastellist. At young age she was taught by her father. Though her mother was strict, she greatly encouraged her teenage daughter's artistic talents. She accompanied her to places where a young girl of her class could not go alone, chaperoned her sittings and took her to see works of art. Élisabeth Louise created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette. She enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats, actors, and writers, and was elected to art academies in ten cities. Some famous contemporary artists, such as Joshua Reynolds, viewed her as one of the greatest portraitists of her time, comparing her with the old Dutch masters.
The painting is at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, USA.
Pulisena Margherita Nelli, Sister Plautilla (1524-1588) was an Italian Renaissance artist, art teacher and prioress. She was born to a wealthy merchant couple in Florence. She was a nun of the Dominican convent of Staint Catherine of Siena located in Piazza San Marco, Florence, and was heavily influenced by the teachings of Savonarola and by the artwork of Fra Bartolomeo. She signed her paintings as "Pray for the Paintress" after her name. She also led the convent's workshop wich created paintings and sculptures to be sold to churches and to private homes.
The painting is in San Domenico Church in Perugia, Italy.
Helen Dryden (1882–1972) was an American artist and successful industrial designer in the 1920s and 1930s. She trained in landscape painting but she soon gave that up to draw women’s fashions. She was reportedly described by The New York Times as being the highest-paid woman artist in the United States in the 1930s. After start of WWII she struggled with mental health and lived in comparative poverty.
Annie Sullings Gooding Sykes (1855-1931) was an American Impressionist artist. She was born in 1855 in Brookline to a seamstress and a silversmith. She began sketching in her teens, and in about 1875, she entered Boston’s Lowell Institute. In 1878, she transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After moving to Cincinnati in 1882 she studied at Cincinnati Art Academy.
She specialized in watercolors, focusing on garden, floral, landscape and coastal themes in her work. In the summers, she worked along the New England coast. She was a co-founder of the Woman's Art Club of Cincinnati and its president. Despite ill health in her later years, she painted until her death in Cincinnati in 1931; as noted in the Cincinnati Enquirer she: "worked up to the end, even when she was physically unable to do so. Her devotion to the art was one of the beautiful things in her eventful life."
Mary Arbuckle Newbery Sturrock (1892–1985) was a Scottish artist who worked across various media. She was born in 1892 in Glasgow to designer and embroider Jessie Rowat Newbery and Director of the Glasgow School of Art, Francis Henry Newbery. She studied in the Life School of Drawing and Painting at the Glasgow School of Art and was later a member of the Edinburgh Group of artists. During World War I she worked at a munitions factory in Tilbury and as a tracer for the De Havilland aircraft manufacturer. Post-World War I, she regularly exhibited work with the Edinburgh Group as an applied artist. She worked as an artistic designer. During the 1950s she travelled extensively across Europe and internationally to China, Japan and Mexico. She is best known now as an embroiderer and watercolour artist of flowers.
Éva Amália Striker Zeisel, known as Eva Striker Zeisel, (1906–2011) was Jewish industrial designer known for her ceramics, who lived and worked in Hungary and USA.
She was born in Budapest in 1906 to Laura Polányi Striker, a historian and one of first women to get PhD of University of Budapest (1909), and her husband, a factory owner. Her mother hosted a literary salon and after Eva found interest in art, her mother used her connections found best artists to teach her. Eva entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at age 17, intending to become a painter, but her mother prevailed upon her to learn some trade in which she could be more sure to earn a living. So Eva apprenticed herself to a traditional potter and began learning her trade, first working as a designer in the Kispester Factory in Budapest, later moving to Germany, where she acquired skills in all phases of industrial production and became one of the first to move the ceramic arts into contemporary mass production.
As Eva was and Jewish, in the late 30s she had to escape Nazism by finding work in Russia however she was wrongly accused of being part of a plot to assassinate Stalin and imprisoned for 16 months. Her experience is the basis for the novel "Darkness at Noon" by her friend Arthur Koestler. Miraculously she escaped Russia and moved to Vienna A few months after her arrival in Vienna the Nazis invaded, and Eva took the last train out and fled to England and gotten married. Soon she moved to USA with her husband and got a job as a design teacher at Pratt Institute.
In 1942, she was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and Castleton China to design a set of modern, porcelain, undecorated china for exhibition at MoMA, and to be produced for sale by Castleton after WW II. Her designs received wide praise and established her reputation as a designer in USA. After that she designed ceramics, china, tableware and glassware for many top American companies. She continued to design and produce dinnerware and other useful objects until her death at the age of 105 in New York.
The last photo is of Eva Striker Zeisel in early 1980s.
Isabel Bishop (1902-1988) was an American Social Realist painter and printmaker. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to descendants of wealthy and well educated mercantile families. Her father was a Greek and Latin scholar and her mother was a writer and an activist for women’s suffrage. Isabel Bishop knew early in her life that she was destined to be an artist, and in 1918 moved to New York City to study illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women. In 1920 she changed her emphasis to painting and transferred to the Art Students League where she studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller. During her studies there, she developed her realist technique as well as her sensitive approach to light and shadow. In 1926 she opened her studio that overlooked Union Square at Broadway and Fourteenth Street. She is known for depicting urban life and was a leading member of the Fourteenth Street School of artists. In 1932, she joined the Midtown Gallery in Manhattan, with which she remained closely affiliated for the rest of her life. She taught as a full time instructor at the Art Students’ League in New York from 1936 to 1937. She also taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
About her illustrations of Pride and Prejudice Isabel said: "These drawings, for Pride and Prejudice, aim only to declare my own particular delight in the book – they are not trying the impossible task of embellishing an already complete and perfect work! But my involvement in this undertaking has to do, also, with my feelings – wildly presumptuous – that in Jane Austen’s handling of the writer’s problem, certain minor factors relate (at the greatest possible distance) to my own efforts as an artist over fifty years. They are these: she doesn’t describe, in detail, environments; while she gives you the immediate social context of her characters, she is silent about the wider context (you don’t know the general economic situation, or that England was at war); she doesn’t allow you to care what people had on, or even about the details of their physiognomies! She governs the questions you are allowed to ask – she forbids any impulse to ask others! This sounds negative. (She herself said about her method that she “lop’t and crop’t”!) In the end what she presents to you as important convinces you utterly, in its completeness and humor, and its importance assumes monumentality. In other words, she limits her esthetic problem and, in her case, gains great power through it. What a lesson for visual art! In fact, the whole “modern” period of painting (since 1910) has been preoccupied with some aspect of this problem."
The original of the artwork is now at the Pierpont Morgan Library (now known as Morgan Library & Museum) in New York City, New York, USA.
The second image is a photo of Isabel.
Lydia Field Emmet (1866–1952) was an American artist. She was born in 1866 to an illustrator Julia Colt Pierson Emmet and her husband, a merchant. Her first painting teacher was her sister, illustrator and painter Rosina Emmet Sherwood. Later she studied in Paris and New York. At age 14, she was already selling illustrations to magazines like Harper's Weekly. During the 1880s and 1890s, she designed stained-glass windows for Tiffany & Co. Later she devoted herself to painting portraits. She achieved her greatest financial success and widespread fame through commissioned portraits of children. She also worked as an art teacher, designer and illustrator.
The stained glass is at The Kingsbridge Historical Society (KHS) Headquaters at Edgehill, a registered New York City landmark church building in Bronx, New York City, New York, USA.
The second artwork is her self-portrait from 1912.
Élisa Marie Stéphanie Adrienne Sonrel, known as Élisabeth Sonrel, (1874-1953) was a French painter and illustrator. She studied at the Académie Julian in Paris in the studio of Jules Lefebvre. At the age of 18 she completed her final examination with a painting Pax et Labor, which is now owned by Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours. From 1893, she worked in Paris, and in 1895, she set up her own studio in Sceaux, where she worked until her death. She then exhibited at the Salon between 1893 and 1940. She made regular painting trips to Brittany, inspired by the forest of Brocéliande, and from 1910 to various places on the coast such as Concarneau, Plougastel, Pont-l'Abbé and Loctudy, often staying at inns and accompanied by one or two students. She painted several works in Le Faouët before constructing a villa in La Baule in the 1930s. She used her drawings and watercolors to illustrate books, primarily religious ones. She also created portraits, posters, designed postcards, and decorative panels.
Evangeline Mary Daniell, also known as Eva Daniell, (1881–1902) was a British artist. She was born in 1881 in Ulverston. Her mother was a miniature painter Mary Eales (working under name Mrs. Bampfylde Daniell or Mary Bampfylde Daniell), who latter also worked as an illustrator, and her father was a solicitor. In 1896, Evangeline Mary designed the cover of Rudyard Kipling's book The Seven Seas in an Art Nouveau style, signing it with the monogram EMD. In next years several of her drawings, were published as color art postcards with gold highlights by the London publisher Raphael Tuck & Sons. They were very popular. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 21.
Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998) was an African American artist and educator. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Thomas Vreeland Jones and Carolyn Adams. Her father was a building superintendent who later became a lawyer after becoming the first African-American to earn a law degree from Suffolk Law School, and her mother worked as a cosmetologist. Her parents encouraged her to draw and paint using watercolors during childhood. She studied art at Boston High School of Practical Arts, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Designers Art School of Boston. Later she studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. Her career began in the 1930s, shortly after finishing college, and she continued producing artwork until the age of 92. Her style shifted and evolved multiple times in response to influences in her life, especially her extensive travels. She worked with different mediums, techniques, and influences throughout her career. Her extensive travels throughout Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean influenced and changed how she painted. In her youth she also designed fabric. She taught at the Howard University for decades.
Odette-Marie Pauvert (1903-1966) was a French painter and illustrator. She was born to miniature painter Louise Cochet-Pauvert, painter, and painter Henri Pauvert. She was taught by her mother before entering the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1921. She won Prix de Roma in 1925 with her painting Légende de saint Ronan. Because of this she could reside in Rome from 1926 to 1929. After returning to Paris she executed major large-scale decorations and frescos. She painted a lot of sacred art. Instead of following radical avant-garde movements, she created art in a distinct style that fused classical akademism with the stylized, geometric structures of Art Deco. However in late 1930s her success slowed down due to World War II and the rise of abstract avant-garde movements. Due to lack of public commissions she she steered toward miniature and easel painting to provide for her family. During WWII and after she painted numerous sensitive portraits, Spanish landscapes, and domestic scenes.
The painting shows the artist's daughter Odile with her nanny Adèle, who had recently been widowed. The artist's daughter Odile Tissier (1938–2020) was the eldest of her three children. She later become a fashion designer. Her mother often portrayed her. Interestingly Odile's mother-in-law was a composer Yvonne Desportes, who won Premier Grand Prix de Rome in composition in 1931, and her father-in-law was a sculptor Ulysse Gemignani, who won Premier Grand Prix de Rome in sculpture in 1932.
Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978) was an Afroamerican artist. She was born 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, as the oldest of four daughters, to Amelia Woodsey Cantey, a seamstress and dress designer, and John Harris Thomas, a businessman. She was greatly influenced by her mother's work and later stated that her mother was "outstanding in colors. Everything she made was like a painting.... She sat at the sewing machine, and at night we would hear her singing as she sewed.... That's why I am as I am.". As a child Alma used local clays to make homemade dishes and sculptures. In 1906, after the Atlanta Race Riot, her family relocated to Washington, D.C., where she enrolled in the city’s segregated schools. She earned a teaching certificate in 1913, taught for some time, later studied home economics, and finally graduated from fine arts in 1924. After graduating, she taught art at Shaw Junior High School in D.C. for over three decades. While teaching full-time and earning her master's in art education, she remained active in the Washington art scene, painting and exhibiting. After retiring from teaching in 1960 she fully immersed herself in painting. By the 1960s, she developed her signature style of mosaic-like dabs of paint across the canvas that create structured yet free-flowing patterns. She was greatly inspired by the landscapes of Georgia and Alabama, particularly the gardens that bloomed around the her childhood home. With her painting Resurrection she become the first African-American woman to be included in the White House's permanent art collection.
Guntza, also known as Gunza, (8th century) was a nun and a scribe (scriptrix) from Karl(s)burg monastery near Würzburg in present-day Germany. This initialls are from manuscript Defensor Liber scintillarum. Liber scintillarum (Book of sparks) is a compilation of excerpts from the Bible, the Gospels, and treatises and commentaries of both Western and Eastern Church Fathers. The original Liber scintillarum is believed to have been written by the Benedictine monk Defensor at the monastery at Ligugé, near Poitiers, in Merovingian France in the late 7th or early 8th century.
This is the link to digitalised manuscript.