The Women of the Brandywine – Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871-1954)
The Brandywine Valley, which sweeps from southeasten Pennsylvania into northern Delaware, fostered a wealth of talent at the turn of the 20th century. Howard Pyle, known as “the Father of American Illustration” was beginning his own artistic movement and school in this rural area of the East Coast. Pyle’s romantic imagery in his work was passed on to his female students whom he taught with total equality. But, by default of their sexually segregated times, women were denied access to their contemporaries’ fraternal discussions, where ideas and techniques were exchanged. This caused a separate and similarly closeknit sorority to grow among these women artists. The Brandywine’s “softer sexed” artists were both eccentric and inspired and their effects on one another’s work retains all the raw American stamina instilled by Pyle, but it is also notably gracious and graceful, in both content and execution.
Hobby drawing was common among upper and middle class American women, but it was thought that more professional training might ignite ambitions which would hinder a woman’s success in matrimonial existence. The Civil War had brought the American people their first pictures in newspapers, and people came to expect illustrations in every magazine accompanying serial stories and in books.
Elizabeth Shippen Green, whose father had been an artist-correspondent for “Harper’s Weekly” during the Civil War, saw no problem with his little girl pursuing a life as an artist-illustrator. Jasper Green came from a well-connected Pennsylvania Quaker family and his daughter was afforded every possible social and educational advantage at schools approved by your anglophile parents.
Under Howard Pyle’s tutilage her drawing skills were developed but she departed from his cultivation to investigate fresh and challenging paths. Her touch was both organic and ethereal and strayed form the harsh realism of her schooling and exudes the influences of Art Noveau and expressionism, while retaining a sophisticated sentiment. Her work was to become representative of the Brandywine women who would become famous for playful and highly idyllic portrayals of model Victorian children.