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Portrait
of Miss Mattie McLean, 1940 Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1873 to Charles Potter and Elamanda (Ritter) Hergesheimer. The great great granddaughter of Charles Willson Peale, she studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for two years and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for four where she worked with Cecelia Beaux and William Merritt Chase. Judged the best pupil in her senior class, Sophonisba won a three-year Cresson Traveling Scholarship to study abroad. While in Paris she studied at the Academie Colorossi and exhibited in the Paris Salon. Around 1907 Hergesheimer went to Nashville, Tennessee to paint a portrait of Bishop Holland N. McTyeire for Vanderbilt University. Nashville became her home for the next 36 years. Mattie McLean, subject for this portrait, was secretary to the president at Western Kentucky State Teachers College for 43 years. Hergesheimer was well known in Bowling Green where she conducted art classes and enjoyed a circle of friends that included artists Frances Fowler, Sarah Peyton, and Wickliffe Covington. Exhibiting extensively in the South, Hergesheimer was a printmaker as well as a painter of portraits, still lifes and landscapes. Sophonisba Hergesheimer died in Nashville June 24, 1943. |
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13, 2001 |
