Eva Watson-Sagittarius
Eva Watson-Schütze (born September 16, 1867 in Jersey City , † 1935 in Chicago ) was an American painter and photographer of pictorialism . She was a founding member of the Photo Secession .
Life
Eva Watson began studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1883 at the age of 16 , where she attended Thomas Eakins' class . She mainly practiced in watercolor and oil painting. It is not known whether she was influenced photographically by Eakins. From 1890 she dealt exclusively with photography.
From 1894 to 1896 she shared a photo studio with Amelia Van Buren , also a graduate of the Philadelphia Academy. Watson then opened her own portrait studio. Her pictorial style quickly found recognition, and contemporary photographers praised her aesthetic outlook. In a letter to photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1897, she expressed confidence about the role of women in photography. In 1899 she was elected a member of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia and exhibited under the name Eva Lawrence Watson . In the following year she was elected to the jury of the company alongside Frank Eugene , Gertrude Käsebier , Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence Hudson White .
In 1901, at the insistence of Frances Johnston, she took part in a seminal exhibition of American women photographers in Paris . In the same year she married the German-born lawyer and literature professor Martin Schütze. The couple moved to Chicago, where Martin Schütze took a chair. In 1902 Eva Watson-Schütze was offered membership in the elegant London Linked Ring . She found the exchange with other progressive photographers there very stimulating. She corresponded with Alfred Stieglitz with the intention of creating a similar association in the USA. Towards the end of the year, she and Stieglitz became a founding member of the Photo Secession .
Watson- Schützen spent the summer of 1903 in the Byrdcliffe Colony , an artist colony of the Arts and Crafts Movement near Woodstock . There she and her husband bought a piece of land on which they built a summer house that they called "Hohenwiesen". From 1905 to about 1925 the couple spent the summer and autumn months there.
In 1905 Joseph Keiley published an extensive portrait of Eva Watson-Schütze in Camera Work in which he recognized her as "one of the most reliable and sincere advocates of the pictorialist movement in America." ( Camera Work 9, 1905, pp. 23-36)
In Byrdcliffe, Watson-Schütze found her interest in painting again. After 1910 she rarely took photos, from the 1920s only family photos of her are known. In 1929 she became the director of the Renaissance Society , an art gallery founded in 1915 on the grounds of the University of Chicago . Under Watson-Schützes board of trustees, from 1929 to 1935, the Society showed important exhibitions by artists of the classical modern , such as Jean Arp , Constantin Brâncuși , Georges Braque , Marc Chagall , Wassily Kandinsky , Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso .
Eva Watson-Schützen died in Chicago in 1935.
literature
- C. Jane Gover: The Positive Image - Women Photographers in Turn of The Century America , State University of New York Press, 1988, ISBN 0-88706-533-3 (English)
- Jean F. Block: Eva Watson Schütze - Chicago Photo-Secessionist . University of Chicago Library, 1985, ISBN 0-943056-06-3 (English)
- Martha Kreisel (Ed.): American Women Photographers - A Selected and Annotated Bibliography . Greenwood Press, London 1999, ISBN 0-313-30478-5 (English)
Web links
- Eva Watson-Schütze on photogravure.com (English)
- Eva Watson-Schütze at photography-now.com
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Watson Sagittarius, Eva |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Watson, Eva (maiden name); Watson, Eva Lawrence; Watson Sagittarius, Eva Lawrence |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter and photographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 16, 1867 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Jersey City |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1935 |
| Place of death | Chicago |