Jane Peterson

Jane Peterson was born in Elgin, Illinois on November 28, 1876. At the age of nineteen, she arrived in New York with more courage than pennies in her pocket to study at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and subsequently at the Art Students League of New York. Before she was thirty, she found the backing to make the all-important trip to Paris where the art scene offered dazzling samples of the movements then in vogue: Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and the advent of Cubism. Her eyes were opened wide by the daring compositions issuing from the studios of Picasso, Matisse, Leger, Braque, and Cezanne - an experience she later admitted was a bit overwhelming for a newcomer to the big stage of art.

Without doubt she gained from the exposure, all the while careful not to abandon what she felt was foremost to her own aesthetic vision. Refinement and a harmonious balance between shape and color were solid components of her style, one, nonetheless, that was fluid enough to allow an intelligent acceptance of the varied painting techniques she felt would expand her art. At one point in her artistic career she was linked with Maurice Prendergast. Prendergast and Peterson did share an attraction to outdoor scenes, an unerring sense of decorative design and a graphic use of color as linear pattern. Yet Peterson shied away from any ambiguous placement of forms or eccentric compositional structures, steering her own individual course between innovation and elegance.

Peterson traveled abroad extensively, exhibited often and married the wealthy American lawyer M. Barnard Philip who provided his artist-wife with a studio on the top floor of their home at 1007 Fifth Avenue, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The four years of their marriage (1925-1929) is the only period during which Peterson did not travel. Instead, her work was dominated by what she termed her “flower portraits,” bold and expressive still lifes that incorporated richly colored backgrounds. The decades of the thirties and forties, following Philip’s death, Peterson spent winters on the French Riviera or in Palm Beach, Florida, while summers most often found her at her estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

In 1938, Peterson 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. She was also a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Peterson died on August 14, 1965 in Kansas City, Missouri.