Nawa Luminaries is the intersection of NAWA’s Historical Research and current events around the United States highlighting celebrated NAWA members.

Gertrude Horsford Fiske

NAWA Luminaries celebrates another historical member in the 135^th Anniversary Exhibition at Lincoln Glenn and Graham Shay 1857’s combined galleries.

Gertrude Horsford Fiske

Gertrude Horsford Fiske was born in 1879, one of six children born into a wealthy Boston family. Educated in Boston’s best schools, she was an equestrian and a skilled golfer who won the Amateur Golf Championship of Massachusetts in 1901.

In 1904, at age 25, she enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and studied under Edmund C. Tarbell, Frank Benson, and Philip Hale. During the summers, she attended Charles Woodbury’s classes in Ogunquit, Maine, and his bold, painterly approach to landscape painting would influence Gertrude’s emerging artistic style. Woodbury, who established the Ogunquit Summer School of Painting and Drawing in Maine, would encourage Gertrude to “paint in verbs, not in nouns.” ¹

She was one of the few students to complete the full seven-year curriculum. After Fiske completed her coursework in 1912-13, she spent time in France, sketching as she traveled.

In 1914, she played an essential role in forming the Guild of Boston Artists and nurturing other artists. Her first significant public recognition came when she received a Silver Medal in 1915 at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition, and the following year, she was given her first solo show at the Guild of Boston Artists. In 1917, she was instrumental in establishing the Boston Society of Etchers, and that same year, she had solo shows at the Cleveland Museum and Rhode Island School of Design. Vose Galleries sold its first painting by Fiske in 1917, a self-portrait titled Study in Black and White, in a show of Boston women artists.

A newspaper clipping shows Gertrude Fiske working on a portrait at her studio in the Riverway when she was named to the Massachusetts State Art Commission. Vose Gallery

Gertrude became a member of the National Association of Women Artists in 1918. She exhibited annually with various art associations, including shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. By her late thirties, Fiske had earned a reputation for being a leading woman painter in Boston.

A newspaper clipping shows Gertrude Fiske working on a portrait at her studio in the Riverway when she was named to the Massachusetts State Art Commission. Vose Gallery:

In 1922, Gertrude was named the first and only woman to the Massachusetts State Art Commission.  The appointing board noted, “Fiske ranks with the foremost painters in the country…and there are few artists who have been awarded more prizes than Miss Fiske in the entire country. There is a note of personal distinction in all of her work – a virile note.”²

Gertrude Fiske, The Carpenter, circa 1922, Oil on canvas, Gift of the estate of Miss Gertrude Fiske, 1966.

A New York Times review on March 26, 1922, showcases the prize-winning pictures at a National Academy of Design exhibit and features a black-and-white image of Gertrude’s The Carpenter.

Fiske won the Thomas B. Clarke prize for the painting, with the reviewer noting “an unremarkable figure looking remarkable through adroitly contrived placing, a background, and lighting that have more to do with the effect than the figure itself.” Fiske was elected a full member of the National Academy in 1930.

By the mid-1920s, Gertrude was a well-established woman artist, with portrait commissions as her primary income source. She also painted many figure scenes in indoor and outdoor settings, landscapes, beach scenes, amusement parks, and the occasional still life.  “All were painted in vibrantly colored, simplified forms and powerful, free brushstrokes that attested to her affiliation with the Boston Museum School and Charles Woodbury.”³

In 1928, Gertrude, Charles Woodbury, and fellow artists formed the Ogunquit Art Association, an art colony in the Ogunquit area of Maine. The Association would attract notable Modernists, including George Bellows and Edward Hopper. Gertrude painted landscapes around Ogunquit, at Revere Beach in Massachusetts, a stone quarry near her home in Weston, Massachusetts, and at the Navy Yard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She included men and women in her compositions, using bold colors, and was respected for her likenesses of male artists. She often portrayed distinctive New England characters, including florists, craftsmen, postmen, and fishermen. Still, she was known for her strong depictions of women in interiors with power instead of gentility and fragility.

Gertrude Fiske, Jade, ca. 1918, Oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 23 3/4 in., National Academy of Design, New York, NY

Gertrude,  who never married, had the financial means to paint full-time. Her artwork made its way to esteemed exhibitions, including those at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the National Academy of Design, the Corcoran Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Guild of Boston Artists, the Schoelkopf Galleries in New York, and one-person shows at the Vose Galleries in Boston. She received the Shaw Prize for Women Artists (twice) and the Proctor Prize for portraiture from the National Academy of Design.

In 2018, Gertrude’s remarkable body of work was celebrated in the exhibition “Gertrude Fiske: American Master,” held at Discover Portsmouth, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Organized by the Portsmouth Historical Society, the exhibit was curated by Lainey McCartney. According to McCartney, Gertrude’s “extraordinary talent, dignity, and unrelenting work ethic challenged conventional gender roles and expectations of her time. She blazed a trail for future female artists by forging her path in a period when traditional norms held sway.”⁴

In addition to participation in the current exhibition of NAWA historical members at Lincoln Glenn and Graham Shay 1857, Gertrude Fiske’s work is also being celebrated in Interior Lives: Modern American Spaces, 1890– 1945, organized by the Columbia Museum of Art till May 12, 2024.

Sources:

Women Artists’ Collections Special Collections and University Archives Rutgers University Libraries. NAWA Collection, Kate Van Riper, Archivist.

https://www.fineartandyou.com/2023/10/gertrude-fiske-american-impressionist.html

^1,4“Gertrude Fiske breaks the glass ceiling at Discover Portsmouth.” The Magazine Antiques. April 3, 2018.

³https://www.lincolnglenn.com/artists/643-gertrude-fiske/

²Russack, R. https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/gertrude-fiske-american-master/

Vose Gallery: https://www.vosegalleries.com/services/estates/fiske-gertrude-1878-1961

Susan M. Rostan, M.F.A , Ed.D. Co-Leader: NAWA Historical Research Team

Signature Member of the National Association of Women Artists

NAWA. Empowering Women Artists Since 1889