Olivia

Artist: Lydia Field Emmet (American, 1866–1952)

Original Dimensions: 64" x 40 1/2"

Location: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

About Artwork:  (1911) "This appealing full-length portrait, one of the artist’s most popular works, represents the young Olivia Egleston Phelps Stokes (1908–1983), a daughter of the Episcopal clergyman and educator Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes, who commissioned the portrait in 1911. Olivia was awarded an honorable mention when it was exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in 1912. The artist Guy Pène du Bois admired the painting for its spontaneity and vivacity, and the noted collector Duncan Phillips praised it, concluding that “the artist was evidently enraptured with the subject.” The Stokes family owned portraits by other noted artists of the day, including Cecilia Beaux and John Singer Sargent.

Active in New York and Massachusetts, Lydia Field Emmet was one of the leading society portraitists of her generation. Particularly admired for her portraits of women and children, at the height of her career she was considered one of the most talented American woman artists, second only to Cecilia Beaux. Her fluid, painterly style was influenced by Sargent and William Merritt Chase. Chase had been one of her teachers at the Art Students League in New York, and she taught at his Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island. With its tilted floor, slanted ground line, and slightly off-center figure placed within an evocative interior, Olivia recalls Chase’s depictions of children lost in the wonder of exploring the richly appointed rooms of their extensive homes." - (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)