Portraits often mirror the artist as much as their subjects. On the
walls of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., last week, hung a
collection of portraits that were animated with gentle strength of
character, aglow with love of children. They depicted many famous
men—Philosopher William James, Pablo Casals, Richard Harding Davis,
Robert E. Sherwood . But what they described with even
greater certainty was their creator, Ellen Emmet Rand, who plainly
painted with malice toward none.The collection showed 90 works of an artist who eagerly started to draw
at four, and still eagerly painted at 66, when she died . In
her lifetime, she turned out about 800 paintings, also found time to
marry and raise three sons.In the '90s, San Francisco-born Ellen Rand, daughter of Christopher
Temple Emmet ,
went to study in Paris with Sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. “Everybody
was running around that studio,” a friend remembers, “nude male models,
and there was even a panther in a cage. And here she came into this
chaos and just sat there painting simply beautiful things.” At the turn
of the century, Ellen Rand held her first one-man exhibit in Manhattan,
and the procession of the rich and famous to her studio began.Painter Rand started a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt but had to give it
up. “It was ridiculous,” she recalled. “He couldn't sit
still—especially with children going in and out of the studio with
snakes and spiders.” Later, Franklin D. Roosevelt was almost as
difficult. She tried him first at Hyde Park in a room where 25 newsmen
were interviewing the President. The second time, she painted the
President in her Manhattan studio—from sketches. It was a gay
portrait, showing the famous F.D.R. smile, and as soon as he saw it,
F.D.R. himself ordered the smile off.For her portraits, she was paid as much as $3,000 to $5,000. In one year
, she earned $74,000. Looking at her later pictures, her critics
professed to long for her “earlier, freer work,” before she was hemmed
in by fashionable portraiture. Last week the Berkshire show gave
critics a chance to reassess Ellen Rand's lifetime production. Their
verdict: a good second to her contemporary, Mary Cassatt .
America's best woman painter.
