Louis Michel Eilshemius - Beach at Apia, Samoa - 1966.79.5 - Yale University Art Gallery

Born in New Jersey, studied in Europe, 1873-81, settled in New York City. Idiosyncratic painter who called himself a ​“Transcendental Eagle of the Arts” but whose increasingly subjective pictures received little attention during his lifetime. Charles Sullivan, ed American Beauties: Women in Art and Literature (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with National Museum of American Art, 1993) Born into a wealthy family, Louis M. Eilshemius studied art in Germany and at the Art Students League in New York. Eilshemius’s romantic landscapes were influenced by the French Barbizon and American Hudson River schools. He was active in New York at the same time as the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder and was greatly influenced by Ryder’s somber, moonlit scenes. Like Ryder, Eilshemius suffered several professional and romantic rejections and became a recluse. He finally experienced success as an artist in 1917, when French artist Marcel Duchamp ​“discovered” him at the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York. Although hailed as a modern, visionary painter, Eilshemius’s success appeared to fuel his peculiarities, and he abandoned painting in 1921.

She attended Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina before moving to Washington D.C. where she enrolled in the Corcoran College of Art and Design. From there she went to the Art Students League in New York City where she studied with George Bridgman and at the National Academy of Desigh with Charles Webster Hawthorne. She then moved to Paris where she studied with Fernand Léger and André Lhote and to Munich where she studied under Hans Hoffman. After close to a decade in Europe she returned to the United States in 1935. In 1942 she painted a mural in the US Post Office in Camilla, Georgia, entitled Theme of the South. The mural was funded by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a program created under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to provide work to artists and embellish public buildings. Later in life she returned to South Carolina and following that move the state and its people became the major theme in her work. She stated, "the South has been sung in song, literature, prose, and poetry, but the portrayal of the South in painting has not been successfully done as yet. I seek to put the poetry and history of the South in paint, but with vigor and creativeness and not sentimentalism."