The art critic Patricia Tilton commented on the artist I am featuring today, Laura Wheeler Waring, writing: Waring is the perfect role model for little girls who have big dreams. Determined and committed to pursuing her passion, young Laura...
The art critic Patricia Tilton commented on the artist I am featuring today, Laura Wheeler Waring, writing:
Waring is the perfect role model for little girls who have big dreams. Determined and committed to pursuing her passion, young Laura began to manifest her dreams. She was self-confident, believed in her gift, and welcomed each opportunity that came her way.
Laura Wheeler, later Laura Wheeler Waring, was born in Hartford Connecticut on My 26th 1887. She was the fourth of six children.
Her father was Reverend Robert Foster Wheeler, who was the pastor of the first all-Black church in Connecticut, the Talcott Street Faith Congregational Church. It had been built in 1819 as a place for African Americans to worship on their own since they were previously only able to worship in the backs of churches and in church galleries in that city. Her mother was Mary Wheeler (née Freeman), who was a teacher and amateur artist. Laura’s maternal grandparents were Amos Noë Freeman, who was a Presbyterian minister, and her maternal grandmother, Christiana Williams Freeman, was an anti-slavery activist who worked as part of the Underground Railroad which was the given name to a secret network of escape routes and safe houses run by abolitionists in Portland, Maine, and Brooklyn, New York. Laura’s family were well educated. Her father studied Theology and graduated from Howard University in 1877 and her mother graduated from Oberlin College.
Still life with Heather by Laura Wheeler Waring (1927)
Laura’s parents were determined that their children should learn about African history and were attendees at the local bible classes. The family would also make regular visits to Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as well as other local art events. The children soon developed a love of art and would frequently sit around their dining room table to sketch and paint together. The American art critic Patricia Campbell Carlson wrote about young Laura:
“…[Waring] would even bribe her brothers and sisters with peppermints to get them to pose for her. And although she knew there were no portraits of African Americans in museums yet, she hung her paintings in her room as a ten-year-old so that her sisters and brothers could see pictures of people with all different shades of brown staring back at them,,,”.
After Sunday Services by Laura Wheeler Waring
Laura Wheeler Waring attended Arsenal Grade School and Hartford High School and was a model student who graduated from Hartford with honours. Whilst at the High School she showed an interest in art and the school fostered this love of hers, encouraging her enthusiasm for drawing and painting with watercolours. She graduated from Hartford High School in 1906 with honours.
Institute for Colored Youth Building Historical Marker
In the Autumn of 1907, Laura, now a twenty-year-old, through the auspices of her father was offered and accepted a position at the Institute for Coloured Youth, an African Institute, a trade school that taught young Black people necessary skills to retain employment and later became a training institution for teachers. In 1902, the Institute moved to George Cheyney’s farm, 25 miles west of Philadelphia, and afterward the name “Cheyney” became associated with the school and became known as the Cheyney Training School for Teachers. Nowadays and since 1983 it has become the Cheyney University of Pennsylvania.
Girl in Green Cap by Laura Wheeler Waring
Times were difficult financially for Laura who was paid just seven dollars a month although room and board were provided. She needed money to pay the train fare to Philadelphia where she attended drawing classes, still life painting, portraiture, and illustration at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She remained there for the next six years. The person who influenced Laura the most at the Academy was Henry Bainbridge McCarter, an American illustrator and painter known for his influence on the modernistic art movements. McCarter had worked as an illustrator in New York before becoming an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for forty years. He managed to encourage Waring to take on board and appreciate Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Girl in Red Dress by Laura Wheeler Waring
In 1914, Laura graduated from the Academy, and she was awarded the William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts prize was a two-year scholarship for foreign travel awarded annually to their art students. This award for artistic excellence, which began in 1902, was funded by Emlen and Priscilla Cresson in memory of their son William Emlen Cresson, an Academy alumnus, who died in 1868 at the age of 23. He had been a child prodigy painter who began exhibiting at the Academy at a very young age. The award allowed recipients to study art at the Louvre. Laura was the first Black woman to receive the award,
A Rural Landscape by Laura Wheeler Waring
Whilst in Paris Laura studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and travelled throughout Great Britain. During her stay in the French capital, she spent much time in the Louvre Museum studying the works of Monet, Manet, Corot, and Cézanne. In Theresa Leninger-Millerher article: A constant stimulus and inspiration”: Laura Wheeler Waring in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, she quotes Laura as saying:
“…I thought again and again how little of the beauty of really great pictures is revealed in the reproductions which we see and how freely and with what ease the great masters paint…”
Still Life with Fruits by Laura Wheeler Waring
Laura Wheeler Waring had originally planned to travel more around Europe visiting Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, but her trip was cut short when war was declared in Europe and she had to return to America.
Four Friends by Laura Wheeler Waring
Back in America, Waring returned to teaching at Cheyney, and she played an important role in setting up the school’s new art and music departments. For thirty years she acted as the department’s art director and Chair, and between 1921 and 1934 she conducted the Cheyney Choir, training her students in high-toned spirituals and classical music. The Cheyney College like the local church, the Thornbury African Methodist Episcopal Church, slowly became the community centre for the black residents of Cheyney. Laura took her choir to sing at the church. It was through her involvement with the church that she first met Annie Washington Derry, who would later become the subject of her most famous portrait which she completed in 1927 and which is owned by the Smithsonian is American Art Collection in Washington DC.
Landscape with River by Laura Wheeler Waring
Laura took a year out from teaching between 1924 and 1925 and returned to Paris. This time she was accompanied by African-American novelist and poet, Jessie Redmond Fauset. On her arrival at the French capital she enrolled for classes in Expressionism and the Romanticism which were run by French artist and designer Bernard Boutet de Monvel, and the American painter Robert Henri. In October 1924 she enrolled to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiére, where she studied painting and it was here that she began her life-long love of portraiture.
Once More we Exchange Adieu by Laura Waring (1925)
In January 1925, Laura Waring travelled to the South of France where she spent four days in the coastal town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. While living there she began to create illustrations for short travel stories and completed a number of figurative pen and ink drawings for The Crisis magazine. One of these was her pen and ink drawing entitled Once More We Exchange Adieu. It depicts an African American woman dressed in a modern collared long sleeve dress, with black pumps holding a briefcase and waving goodbye to a white woman and child dressed in winter attire.
Houses at Semur by Laura Waring (1925)
Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port by Laura Waring (1925)
In the next blog I will be looking at Laura Wheeler Waring’s portraiture, a genre which she is most famous for.
……………………………………………………to be continued.
