Happy birthday, Sigrid Schultz!
Sigrid Schultz was born on January 15, 1893, shortly before the world’s fair known as the World’s Columbian Exposition.
Sigrid spent her early childhood in an area with the evocative name of Summerdale, now part of the Edgewater neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. The neighborhood, located within the Chicago city limits, was largely undeveloped. There were four houses on the block where the Schultz home stood. Native prairie, rich with prairie hens, pheasants, quail and a riot of bright wild flowers, ran alongside the fenced-in gardens, creating a wild playground where Sigrid roamed in the company of three boys from the house closest to the Schultz home, protected by the family’s St. Bernard, Barry, who had served as her “nanny” since she was a baby.
The idyllic Chicago childhood of Sigrid’s memory came to an end in 1901, when Sigrid was eight. Her father moved her family to Europe following an important portrait commission. He intended to stay in Europe for two years. It would be 1941 before Sigrid would once again live in the United States, but she always thought of Chicago as home.
And there is no doubt that she learned things during her years in Chicago that laid the groundwork for her later career as the Berlin bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune: the importance of language, the power of hospitality, and the necessity of standing up against bullies and prejudice.
Happy birthday, Sigrid!
Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
Bridget Quinn first introduced readers to the eighteenth century French painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard in Broad Strokes, her rollicking account of fifteen women artists “who made art and made history (in that order).”* In Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Quinn returns to her subject in a work that is equal parts biography, historiography, and memoir. She traces not only Adélaïde’s life,** but the artist’s role in Quinn’s own life as art historian and author. She introduces the reader to the broader context of art and artists in pre-revolutionary France and the restrictions on women artists within that context. She examines Adélaïde’s artistic rivalry with the better known artist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, which was in some ways constructed as a result of those restrictions. She follows Adélaïde’s attempts to navigate the French art world, the royal system of patronage, and the dangers of the French revolution—and her support of other women artists. Along the way, she makes Adélaïde’s mastery as a painter clear for the modern reader/viewer.
Personally, I have every intention of visiting the masterpiece that hangs in the Met on my next visit to New York thanks to Bridget Quinn.
If you are interest in art, women’s history, or the places where they overlap, this one’s for you.
*I just noticed the double meaning of “Broad” in the title. *Duh*
** See my interview with Quinn in my series of interviews for Women’s History Month in 1922*** for her discussion of using first names for women artists. Her article on the subject triggered my own fascination with the subject.
***I’m running the series again this March, featuring some good people doing a wide range of work.
Women in the Valley of the Kings
One of my favorite books as a child was C.W. Ceram’s Gods’ Graves and Scholars. His aim, described in his foreword, was “to portray the dramatic qualities of archaeology, its human side.” And at some level he succeeded admirably. Ceram is largely responsible for my lifelong fascination with archaeology. It was only when Kathleen Sheppard’s Women in the Valley of the Kings landed on my desk that I realized just how narrow his definition of “human” was.
Subtitled The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age, Sheppard’s book tells the stories of women who worked in the field at the same time as, and sometimes alongside, well-known pioneers of Egyptology like Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter. I will admit, this book would not have hooked 8-year-old Pamela the way Ceram’s did. There is less adventure and more of what Ceram describes as “bookish toil.”* Sheppard’s archaeologists fight not only the hardships of working in the desert, but social expectations about what women could/should do. While some of them did discover important sites and artifacts, much of their most important work happened off-site. where they built and maintained the infrastructure that made the study of ancient Egypt possible. As Sheppard sums it up, “…women recorded, organized, catalogued, and corresponded. Men got dirty, had adventures, and excavated artifacts. Women, in fact, founded the institutions that would received these artifacts and allow the rest of the world to see them.” No less important, but definitely less flashy.
*Sheppard also acknowledges the inherent role of colonialism in the development of Egyptology, something missing from Ceram’s account, which was originally published in 1943.