39. Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low (American, 1858-1946)

A Spanish Lady Playing guitar.
watercolor on paper, signed lower left "Mary Fairchild MacMonnies" and dated "Paris, 1889", matted and framed.
17" x 11" image size.

2,000/4,000     SOLD: $1,955.00

In histories of women in the arts, Mary Fairchild MacMonnies is regarded as one of the few nineteenth-century American women to achieve full professional status as an artist. In pursuing a career as a professional, she encountered a litany of obstacles common to women of her day. In St. Louis, where she was born and began her art training, she and the other women students were denied access to life drawing. She led a rebellion that eventually led the St. Louis School of Fine Arts' authorities to reverse their decision and permit women to draw from the nude.

In Paris, where the current work was produced, Mary Fairchild found that women pursuing an artistic vocation were not admitted to the most prestigious art school, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where tuition was free. Instead, they had to seek training in the private and crowded private schools, at double the fees charged in the men's classes. Mary Fairchild chose to train initially in one of these high priced ateliers, first at the Academie Julian, and subsequently at the considerably more rigorous studio of Carolus-Duran, whose most famous pupil was John Singer Sargent (a decade earlier).

While training with Carolus-Duran, Mary Fairchild met a fellow American sculpture student, Frederick MacMonnies, with whom she fell instantly in love. They did not marry until 1888, however, on account of the stipulation her art scholarship carried: while holding the three-year scholarhip, she was to remain single. When her scholarship expired in August 1888, the couple married.

The present work was produced in 1889, during the first year of the artist's marriage. During the same year Mary Fairchild MacMonnies painted this fresh, light-filled watercolor of a pretty woman strumming a guitar, she had a bright, decorative garden scene (June Morning) accepted at the Salon, and the following week won a Bronze medal and much notice for a dramatic self-portrait at the Paris Exposition Universelle. Around this time, both her career and that of her husband accellerated, and they both received commissions and prizes which afforded them good income and celebrity. Unfortunately, their careers soon forced them to spend great amounts of time apart, and although they had children, the two eventually divorced. She later married American painter, Will Low, and settled in Bronxville, New York. She enjoyed a long and highly productive professional life. Among her most celebrated works are her portraits which are not only good likenesses but communicate a powerful sense of character.

Condition: minor ageing to paper.