Jane Peterson

Jane Peterson (1876-1965) was a celebrated American painter whose colorful Post-Impressionist pictures, still lifes, and travel scenes secured her a substantial place within the American art world of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Elgin, Illinois, Peterson arrived in New York at the age of nineteen with more courage than money in her pocket, determined to pursue a career in art. She enrolled at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and continued her studies at the Art Students League of New York, receiving the foundational American training that would serve as her platform for the more transformative experiences that followed.

Before she was thirty, Peterson found the backing to make the essential trip to Paris, where the art scene offered dazzling exposure to the movements then reshaping European art: Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and the emerging vocabulary of Cubism. Her eyes were opened wide by the daring compositions coming from the studios of Picasso, Matisse, Léger, Braque, and Cézanne, an experience she later admitted was somewhat overwhelming for a newcomer to the largest stage of contemporary art. She absorbed important lessons from this exposure while remaining careful not to abandon what she considered central to her own aesthetic vision, and she developed a mature style built on refinement and a harmonious balance between shape and color that remained fluid enough to incorporate new techniques as they proved useful to her practice.

Peterson was linked at one point in her career with Maurice Prendergast, and the two artists did share an attraction to outdoor scenes, a strong sense of decorative design, and a graphic use of color as linear pattern. Peterson steered a personal course between innovation and elegance, and she traveled abroad extensively throughout her working life. She married the wealthy American lawyer M. Bernard Philip in 1925, and Philip provided his artist-wife with a studio on the top floor of their home at 1007 Fifth Avenue, directly opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the four years of their marriage until Philip's death in 1929, Peterson stopped traveling and produced the bold still lifes she called her "flower portraits," set against richly colored backgrounds.

Following her husband's death, Peterson spent winters on the French Riviera or in Palm Beach, Florida, and summers most often at her estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In 1938 she was named the "most outstanding individual of the year" by the American Historical Society for her artistic achievement. She was a member of the National Academy of Design, the American Water Color Society, the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and the Allied Artists of America, and she served as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She died in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1965, leaving behind a body of work that remains prized for its color, warmth, and independent vision.