Queer Places:
87 Avenue Denfert-Rochereau, 75014 Paris, France
Café d'Harcourt, 47 Boulevard Saint-Michel, 75005 Paris, France
Anne
Estelle Rice (1877–1959) was an American sculptor and artist who was one of
the chief illustrators for the British periodical Rhythm,
edited by John
Middleton Murry and Michael
Sadleir from 1911 to 1913. She established a close relationship with Katherine
Mansfield, and famously painted her wearing red.
Marguerite Zorach's friends included the English painter
Jessica Dismorr, with whom
she shared a studio, and American sculptor
Anne Estelle Rice. Rice, Zorach, and
Dismorr became part of a mixed-sex artistic and social community.
Rice was born in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania in
1877 and grew up in Pottstown.
She studied at the School of Industrial Art of the Pennsylvania Museum and
studied there for three years from 1894 before going on to the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts[1] where
she studied sculpture and life drawing with Charles Grafly, William Merritt
Chase and Thomas Anshutz. She began contributing illustrations to a number of
magazines, including Collier's, Harper's, and the Saturday Evening Post.[2]
In 1906 Rice went to Paris to illustrate the latest fashions for
Philadelphia's North American magazine.[3] In
the summer of 1907 she met the Scottish painter John
Duncan Fergusson who encouraged her to become a painter. Exposed in Paris
to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, she adopted a vivid palette and used red or
blue contouring lines.[4] From
1910 she began to use pure primary and secondary colours. After showing her
painting The Egyptian Dancers (1910), she was claimed by the American press as
the leader of a new school of art.[5]
In 1909, Rice was one of three artists invited by American merchant John
Wanamaker to provide decorative murals for a new store that he was opening
in Philadelphia. To make the work she had to take on a very large studio at 87
rue Denfert-Rochereau in Paris where she worked until the end of 1913 to
produce seven panels depicting figures, mostly women, in classical garden
settings. Rice's murals were removed when the store was remodelled in the
mid-1950s, and were lost, presumed destroyed. During this period, together
with Fergusson, S. J. Peploe, and other members of the Fergusson circle, she
exhibited at the Ashnur Gallery in Paris. She showed at the Salon d’Automne
from 1908 through 1913, and at the Salon des Independents in 1911 and 1912.
London's progressive Baillie Gallery gave Rice major exhibitions in 1911 and
1913. Her work was also included in salons of the Allied Artists Association
in England.
In 1910, in the Café d'Harcourt, boulevard
Saint-Michel, Rice and Fergusson met the publisher John
Middleton Murry.[6] He
introduced them the following year to the New Zealand writer Katherine
Mansfield. A lifelong friendship started from then on between Rice and
Mansfield, who dedicated her 1912 short story "Ole Underwood" to her friend.
Mansfield further expressed her admiration about Rice both as an artist and as
a person. In a letter to Murry written in May 1912, she described the painter
as "an exceptional woman – so gay, so abundant, in full flower just now" who,
"when she is happy and working", "has great personal ‘allure’ – physical
‘allure’." Later, on December 26, 1920, she wrote to Rice: "Whenever
I examine things here – the lovely spring line of flowers and peach leaves par
exemple, I realise what a marvellous painter you are – the beauty of your line
– the life behind it." Moreover, Rice and Fergusson became active
collaborators in Murry's literary and arts quarterly Rhythm,
in which Mansfield was assistant editor until June 1912. According to arts
historian Roger Neill: "The aesthetic concept of "rhythm" – harmony in nature,
vigour and directness – provided the connective tissue, not only between two
Scottish Colourists (Fergusson and Peploe, plus Rice), but also between the
writers and artists involved with the magazine." In 1912, Rice met the
American author Theodore Dreiser in Paris and they became intimate friends and correspondents. Also
in Paris in 1912 Rice met her future husband, the English art and theatre
critic Raymond
Drey. They married in 1913 and began to make their home in England. The
First World War adversely affected Rice: many of the American art dealers and
collectors who showed an interest in her work stopped buying pictures.
Katherine Mansfield by Anne Estelle Rice
Anne Estelle Rice
John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961)
National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Le manteau chinois (Anne Estelle Rice, 1877–1959, Artist)
John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961)
Perth & Kinross Council
The White Ruff (Anne Estelle Rice, 1877–1959, Artist)
John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961)
Perth & Kinross Council
Anne Estelle Rice in Paris (Closerie des lilas)
John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961)
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
It's during the spring and summer 1918, when her close friend she met in
Paris came to visit her at Looe in
Cornwall, that Rice painted her famous portrait of New Zealand short story
writer Katherine
Mansfield. Mansfield had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis and she
suggested herself to be painted in vivid red.[7] Then
she wrote a letter to her collaborator and newly-wed husband John
Middleton Murry to share her experience as Rice's model: A. came early and
began the great painting — me in that red, brick red frock with flowers
everywhere. It’s awfully interesting, even now. I painted her in my way as she
painted me in hers: her eyes … little blue flowers plucked this morning.[8]
Vicki Robson described Rice's Portrait of Katherine Mansfield as such: There
are no softened outlines, and contours are left boldly as literal lines at the
jaw and ear, and around the figure’s left leg and hip. Rice was unconcerned
with ‘finish’, and the raw canvas shows through in places, as does the
under-drawing. Nor is there any of the fine detailing of face and hands found
in conventional portraiture. Rice’s main concern was the integration of the
figure with the background, and she achieved this by bringing the background
forward, the repeating floral patterns of a jug of flowers, wallpaper — or
maybe a patterned shawl — drawing attention to the surface.[9]
The portrait was purchased in 1940 with T. G. Macarthy Trust funds and is now
exhibited in one of Te
Papa Museum's collections in Wellington,
New Zealand.
From the 1920s Rice painted still lifes, exhibiting at the Leicester
Galleries and the Wildenstein Gallery in England. She kept up her visits
to France, and sold paintings to collectors in the Netherlands, Denmark,
France and Germany. Rice was intensely interested in the theatre, often making
theatrical costumes and sets the subjects of her drawings, and in the 1930s
she designed the sets and costumes of several London operatic and dramatic
productions.
Rice's work is represented in numerous private collections in the United
States and the United Kingdom, as well as in University of Hull Art
Collection; Museum
of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand; and the
Government Art Collection, England.
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