Louise Herreshoff

Born in Brooklyn, Herreshoff was the only child of John Brown Francis Herreshoff and her mother was Grace Eugenia Dyer. The Herreshoffs were a prominent Rhode Island family at the time. Herreshoff's mother died when she was four, and she was taken in by her aunts in Providence to be raised. (Her father remarried two years later.) At the age of six, she began art classes with Mary C. Wheeler while attending the Lincoln School, from which she graduated in 1890.

Wheeler was famous for taking her students to Europe for summer study, and on one of these visits in 1895, Herreshoff met Raphaël Collin at Fontenay-aux-Roses. He would become her teacher for the next two summers. In 1898, she moved permanently to France to study with Collin. While she was there, she took sketching and painting visits elsewhere around the continent. In 1899, she enrolled at the Académie Julian, where she was taught by Jean-Paul Laurens, whose use of color had a strong influence on her own style,[2] and by Benjamin Constant.[1]

Her 1899 painting Le Repos was accepted into the 1900 Paris Salon, and that same year An Interior was shown at the National Academy of Design. Herreshoff's early painting style was academic and traditional, but under the influence of Fauvism, she slowly turned to the vivid, bright use of color in her paintings. Her early works were compared to the style of John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase.[3]

In 1903, Herreshoff returned to the United States and showed paintings at the Rhode Island School of Design. Until 1910, she split her time between Providence and New York, summering along the New England coast. In 1910, she married an employee of General Electric, Charles Eaton, in Providence and moved to Schenectady, New York with him. After only three months, they separated, and she returned to Providence to live with her aunt, Elizabeth Dyer, whom she considered a surrogate mother. Between 1921 and 1925, she continued exhibiting and showed artworks at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Watercolor Club, the North Shore Art Association in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the Providence Art Club.[2]

Herreshoff's aunt died in 1927. This event apparently caused her to cease painting; she spent the next forty years collecting porcelain and packed her paintings away in the attic of her Providence home.[4] (Some of the last paintings, Herreshoff completed had been a portrait series of her aunt.[3] One of them on display in 1926 was described as "a forceful bit of painting—fine in character."[5]) Afterwards, her collecting began in earnest, after she inherited from her father in 1932. At sixty-six, in 1941, she married the thirty-eight-year-old Euchlin D. Reeves, a graduate of Washington and Lee University School of Law[2] whom she had met a ceramic collectors' club.[6] The pairing, which at least one writer has suggested was based on a shared love of collecting rather than any romantic attachment,[7] was described as "a fragile union,"[8] although they did remain married for over twenty-five years.

The couple's shared love of acquisition was so great that they eventually filled an entire house with furniture and porcelain, and purchased another next door, the Bannister House, into which they could expand. This house, too, was eventually filled.[7] As the Washington and Lee treasurer James Whitehead described it: "The highly personal collection that began as an orderly display of antiques for [the Reeves’] pleasure and viewing by friends and other collectors slowly became unmanageable."[9] The reason the collection expanded so much was that "should they see one item in a large lot, they would buy the entire assortment. In doing so, they would keep all the unimportant pieces—inexpensive plates, cups and saucers given as premiums at local movie theatres on Saturday nights and dishes given with the purchase of gasoline added to their eclectic accumulation."[9]

The two remained married until Euchlin's death in January 1967. Herreshoff's own death followed later that year. Herreshoff and Reeves are buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.[10][11]

Herreshoff bequeathed her collection, now numbering over 2,000 pieces of Chinese export porcelain as well as British and Continental European examples,[6] to Washington and Lee University.[2] The movers who came to take the porcelain were surprised by the paintings, and only saved them for use of the frames.[4] The Reeves Collection has since grown to encompass work from Asia, Europe, and the Americas,[12] and today contains over four thousand objects.[6]

In 1976, Herreshoff's work was shown in an exhibition co-sponsored by the university and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, bringing it to a wider public. One of her pieces, Poppies of c. 1920, was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830–1930, in 1987.[2] The story of Herreshoff and Reeves is the subject of the book A Fragile Union: The Story of Louise Herreshoff by James W. Whitehead, the curator who helped to bring their art collection to Washington and Lee.[9] Its foreword was written by Tom Wolfe, who has also discussed her paintings.[13]