We left Letta Crapo Smith in the early days of the Detroit Society of Women Painters. Letta was one of the founding members. She quickly became an officer of the group, and then in 1907 was elected President. She led the Society from 1907 till 1915. The painters rarely met in the summer....many of them, including Letta, summered in far away locales. Above, a still life floral by Letta, 1893
Starting in the 1890's, there are records of Letta's travels...to Paris, and the
Academie Julian. A women's painting class from the that era, at the Rue de Berri studio where she likely studied....
Below, one of her teachers, Adolphe-William Bougereau, surrounded by his students, 1896. Both photos are from
this blog, about an Englishwoman who studied at the Academie at the same time as Letta.
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Painting of the ruins by Van Ruisdael, 1650, from The Art Institute of Chicago.
In the early 1900's, she spent her summers in Holland, first at Volendam, where she stayed at the Hotel Spaander, still a hotel after all this time.. and then at an art colony in Egmond. Egmond was famous as the site of a castle ruined when the Spanish were occupying Holland. |
The artists' village in Egmond had been started by fellow Detroiter Gari Melchers and and another painter, George Hitchcock, in the 1880's. They taught a summer art school of sorts, often in the open air, encouraging large paintings. The artists made excursions to country churches, local farms, and the nearby sea and sand dunes (a landscape very similar to the dunes and small coastal towns of northern Michigan), painting the pastoral scenes that were the fashion of the day.
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| Girls at the Beach, L.C. Smith, date unknown |
Letta rented a room and studio space in a small hotel that catered to artists run by a J. Kraakman. Summer days were spent antiquing, riding bicycles to the beach, walking the dunes, and painting under large umbrellas to shield the painters from the sun.
Back in Michigan for the winters, Letta worked hard, not only in her attic studio painting, but directing the activities of the DSOWP. She often suggested specific activities for the group's meetings, including themes for sketches to be brought in for review such as "blue and silver" or "a note of white- for a motif".
The Fourth Annual Exhibition, her first as President, was a great success... a newspaper review of the exhibit headlined "Where 100 Pictures Giving Evidence of Surprising Talent are Hung" states that "Miss Crapo-Smith's work stands out for its strength and beauty."
She also gave informal talks at the meetings, recounting her travels. About her trip to Japan:
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| Helen Hyde in her Tokyo studio |
A print of Helen Hyde's from within a year or so of Letta's visit...
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From the Library of Congress, Honorable Mr. Cat, 1903
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In 1914, there are ominous tidings in the DSOWP's secretary's notebook...
The
Clifton Springs Sanitarium was a famous, state-of-the art facility in its day. Part of its campus has been turned into
an apartment building. Annette Stott, art historian and professor at the University of Denver, mentions that tuberculosis may have been the cause of Letta's illness. Whatever the cause of her ill health, in October 1915 Letta resigned from the Detroit Society of Women Painters.
I can find no further record of our intrepid painter, until her death in Boston, in 1921. I surmise she was out east visiting relatives. Her mother had died in Boston the previous year. They were so close, constant traveling companions. If her elderly mother Lucy had gone to Boston to be near Letta's uncle, William Wallace Crapo, one of Lucy's few surviving (of ten) siblings, Letta surely would have gone, too. William Wallace Crapo's home is now
an oral surgeons' practice, but you can still see what a gracious home it must have been.
She is buried in the family plot in Glenwood Cemetery, Flint, Michigan.
If anyone out there has any further info on her last few years, I would love to hear more of her story. Other paintings by Letta Crapo Smith....
Next in her story: The Lost Letters of Letta Crapo Smith  |
| First Birthday, Flint Museum of Art, currently on loan to the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands, her most well-known painting |
Resources for this post:
My thanks to the librarians at the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library for their assistance, and to Maria Ketcham at the Detroit Institute of Art's research library. I also learned from the following publications:
Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914
Telfair Museum of Art, 2009, by Annette Stott and Holly Koons McCullough
Artists of Michigan From the Nineteenth Century
Muskegon Museum of Art, 1987
Chapter on Letta Crapo Smith, by Annette Stott
History of the Detroit Society of Women Painters
1953, by Julia Gatlin Moore
A Lark Ascends: Florence Kate Upton
1992, by Norma S. Davis
Rural Artists' Colonies In Europe, 1870-1910
2001, by Nina Lubbren
