Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

  I measured sugar and flour and folded them into the eggs and buttermilk, almost as nervous as I was taking those spelling tests. “And Papa says it’s all right?”

  “He worried that you wouldn’t be properly supervised, but I reminded him that my sister and brother live in Chicago. You can stay with them, you’d be chaperoned, and it would save money. Once he was persuaded that your morals were in no danger, he agreed with Mrs. Willis and me that it’s a good idea. You must have a way to earn a living on your own.”

  I’d been holding my breath, and I let it out slowly. “So it’s settled then? I can go to Chicago?”

  “Yes, if you want to. She’ll write you a letter of recommendation, and that will be enough for you to be admitted. Will you pass me the batter for the lemon pies?”

  My hands were shaking when I handed her the bowl. “But—the cost,” I stammered. “How … ?”

  “We’ll get along somehow. Your father is optimistic about starting a new business soon.”

  She smiled brightly, and I did something I hardly ever did: I threw my arms around her and pressed my cheek to hers. “Thank you, Mama,” I said.

  We went back to making pies, and I could not stop smiling and thinking, I am going to Chicago! I’m going to art school! I’m going to become an artist!

  The hot, suffocating days of summer crawled by, but this year there was no money to rent the house by the river. I felt a little guilty that whatever money might have been used for rent was going to pay for me to go to Chicago. Also, though, we were busy baking.

  When I was not perspiring in the kitchen, I escaped upstairs to my studio and painted. During the long twilight evenings I stitched two long black skirts, one black jacket, and three plain white shirtwaists. Auntie had taught me how to make French seams so there were no raw edges. My clothes were so neatly sewn that I could have worn them inside out.

  Aunt Ollie, Mama’s oldest sister, wrote that she and their brother, my uncle Charley, were pleased I was coming, and I would have the spare room in their apartment, only a few blocks from the Art Institute. I wouldn’t even have to take a streetcar.

  I’d been leaving home to go to school since I was twelve. I was now seventeen and should have been used to it, but as September approached, my uneasiness grew. I had never been to a big city. Madison had seemed big at first, but it wasn’t, really, and I couldn’t imagine what Chicago was going to be like. And the Art Institute! I lay awake at night wondering, What if I’m not good enough? I wrote to Susan Young and Alice Peretta and told them what I’d be doing. They both wrote back with congratulations, and Alice added, “You’ll be a shining star, just as you always are.”

  But still I fretted.

  At the end of September my father drove me to the depot in the O’Keeffe & Sons Feed & Grain wagon. Mama, Auntie, my sisters, and Alexius came along. Francis had already left for Boston to study architecture.

  “Remember to write,” Papa said as we waited for the northbound train.

  “Let us know if you need anything,” Mama added.

  I saw again how tired they both looked, how gray Papa’s hair had grown while I was at Chatham, but they never talked about what was worrying them. I’d asked Alexius, who worked at the store when he wasn’t in class at the private academy he attended, if he knew what was going on. Alexius looked away. “Business stinks. That’s all I can tell you, Georgie.”

  The train arrived, and I climbed aboard with my two small suitcases. Everyone waved and smiled as the train pulled out, except Alexius, who ran alongside, shouting, “Goodbye, Georgie! Goodbye, goodbye!”

  I waved back, trying to ignore the sick feeling that lay like a heavy stone in the pit of my stomach. Would I be a shining star, as Alice predicted, or a failure? And what was going to happen to my family if Papa’s business failed?

  PART III

  “A new part of my life began to unfold.”

  11

  Chicago—Fall 1905

  CHICAGO WAS BIGGER, NOISIER, AND MORE FRIGHTENING than I expected. There were elevated trains and electric streetcars, and the streets were crowded with horse-drawn carriages and even a few horseless carriages—I’d seen only one before, rumbling down Duke of Gloucester Street and stirring up clouds of dust. Tall buildings, skyscrapers, crowded together and lit up at night with electric lights.

  “You’re in the big city now,” Uncle Charley said proudly. “More than two million people live and work here. There’s nothing like it anywhere!”

  Two million people, all going somewhere in a hurry, but life with Aunt Ollie and Uncle Charley was quiet and ordinary. No one had time to fuss. Miss Alletta Totto—she’d always been Ollie to us—worked as a stenographer. Every morning she left for her office wearing a black hat with a large feather and carrying a black umbrella, rain or shine.

  Aunt Ollie had never married, but I would not describe her as an old maid, like Aunt Lola. She was strong-willed and independent, and she assumed that I was, too. She gave me whatever I needed, except affection. I admired my aunt and I wanted to be like her, but I didn’t see much of her, and I couldn’t really talk to her when she was around. Uncle Charley managed a business that had something to do with finance. A confirmed bachelor with a huge mustache, he didn’t have much in common with a seventeen-year-old girl. The three of us ate Sunday dinner together, but the conversation was brisk and impersonal, usually about politics and business. They discussed the Teamsters strike (it ended before I came, but twenty-one people had died!), and they argued about who should be the next mayor of Chicago. Aunt Ollie was voting for the Democrat, Uncle Charley supported the Republican, and I didn’t care the least bit about either.

  Alone in the tidy kitchen after Aunt Ollie and Uncle Charley left for work, I had a breakfast of bread and tea and tucked a boiled egg, sometimes two, into my bag for my noon meal. Then, dressed in my black skirt and jacket and white shirtwaist, a black ribbon tied at the end of my braid, I set out on the half-hour walk to the Art Institute, an enormous building near the shore of Lake Michigan with a pair of bronze lions guarding the broad marble steps. On the first day of classes I had to force myself to climb those steps, past those lions.

  Hundreds of students had registered. The first-year students, more than forty of us, were gathered in a huge gallery with dark green walls. As our first assignment we were to make a drawing of a larger-than-life-sized plaster bust of a curly-haired Greek god displayed on a table in the center of the gallery. I thought I was beyond drawing plaster casts and was ready for something new, something more challenging.

  I remembered Sister Angelique’s criticism of my drawing of a baby’s hand: Why have you made it so small and black? It looks like a lump of coal. Since then, I’d learned to make my sketches larger and filled with light. If drawing the bust was the assignment, I would do it, and do it well. I worked quickly, and the face of the Greek god emerged on the paper.

  The instructor made his rounds, offering a comment here, a suggestion there. He stopped by the easel of the student next to me, tapped a finger on the dark, dense rendering, and remarked to the young man, “A lighter touch would improve this.” Then he moved on to mine. “Well done, miss!” My neighbor glared at me, ripped the drawing from his easel, and crumpled it into a ball that he flung to the floor.

  It wasn’t always like that. Many of the other students were very talented, and as the days went by, I could see that their work was richer, more complex, better than mine. My paintings and drawings had been praised since I was a child. I was recognized as the best, the most talented, in Sister Angelique’s class and then in Mrs. Willis’s. But now I quickly discovered that most of the students were more accomplished than I, and I was no longer the star. I had felt confident of my talent at Chatham—so confident that I worked when I was inspired and didn’t work at all when I wasn’t; Mrs. Willis had allowed that. Now I began to doubt myself. I would have to work very hard to catch up.

  Then it got worse.

  I was assigned to an advanced life
drawing class. The students were all female, as Mrs. Willis had promised, but most of them were older and, I thought, more experienced. A male model wrapped in a blue robe strolled into the studio, took his place on a small raised platform, and casually dropped the robe. His privates were barely concealed by a flimsy loincloth. He was almost completely naked! My face grew hot, and I was sure that my blush must be obvious to everyone.

  If the other girls in the class felt any embarrassment, they didn’t show it. Maybe they were more sophisticated than I was, more worldly. Or maybe they were bothered, too, but I was too flustered to notice. I won’t be able to do this, I thought. It’s just too much. Maybe it means I’m not cut out to be an artist after all. I wished I could talk to Aunt Ollie about this, but I didn’t know how to bring up the subject. Anyway, I had a pretty good notion of what my no-nonsense aunt would say: You’re beginning to sound like one of those delicate Southern belles! Totto women are made of sterner stuff. Learn what is required and get on with it.

  I took the advice I thought she’d give me and forced myself to keep going. After four or five classes, I stopped being embarrassed by the model’s near-nakedness, and I could concentrate on my drawing.

  My work improved steadily, and when it was judged at the end of the first month I found that I’d been ranked fourth out of the forty-four and promoted to the intermediate level.

  I signed up for an anatomy class taught by a Dutchman named John Vanderpoel. He used a wooden pointer to call our attention to certain parts of the model’s anatomy, drawing with black and white crayon on big sheets of tan paper while he talked. “Notice the clavicle, here, and how it curves to meet the scapula, there.”

  Mr. Vanderpoel was quite short and had a hunchback, and he stood on a stool while he lectured. Some of the students made fun of his appearance, and that bothered me, because I’d become fond of him. I had gotten over my self-consciousness in the life drawing classes, and I looked forward to Mr. Vanderpoel’s weekly lectures.

  “I recognize what a struggle it was for you in the beginning, Miss O’Keeffe,” Mr. Vanderpoel said in his heavy Dutch accent, tapping my drawing, “but you are getting better, much better.”

  Art Institute classes were very competitive. Each month the teachers pinned our most recent drawings up on the wall and ranked them. It was important to show improvement. A good ranking won you the chance to set up your easel near the front, where you’d have the best view of the model. But if you were ranked fifteenth, say, you found yourself toward the back of the hall. You certainly did not want to be among those who ranked lowest, because eventually those students were asked to leave.

  My confidence grew. Each month I advanced. In December the instructors ranked me fifth in the class of twenty-nine women, and in February they placed me first. I was thrilled, of course, but being first didn’t win me any friends among students who were ranked lower. Because the classes were so competitive, and we always had to be proving ourselves better than the next person, I had made only one friend, Madeleine Connor.

  “I’m going to call you Patsy,” she said, “because with a last name like O’Keeffe you should have a first name that’s more Irish than Georgia. And you must call me Mattie, not Madeleine.”

  From then on in Chicago, I was Patsy.

  We often ate our noon meals together—my boiled egg, her sardine sandwich—and sometimes we went to see the new exhibits at the Institute, shows of work by contemporary French artists and another by Americans.

  “Have you noticed how few women artists are represented?” Mattie asked.

  I hadn’t, until she mentioned it. “I wonder if that’s because there are so few women artists, or if it’s because the men who select the paintings don’t like women’s art?”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?” she said. “There are about twice as many women as there are men in our classes. But it’s the men who end up having their work exhibited in museums.”

  I’m going to change that, I thought. Someday my work is going to hang in a museum.

  In midwinter Mama wrote to me that my sister Catherine had come down with malaria, and although she was feeling better, she wasn’t able to keep up with her schoolwork.

  Catherine is tired all the time, Mama wrote, but not too sick. Nobody recovers in a hot, damp climate, one gets well in bitter cold, and for that reason I am sending her to you. She is bored and does not know what to do with herself, especially since we will not allow her to ride Penelope until she is better. The change will be good for her and possibly good company for you also.

  Catherine traveled alone all the way to Chicago with a note pinned to her coat and arrived looking as limp as a sack of laundry. Uncle Charley set up a cot in my room for her, and Papa sent extra money to pay for her food. My sister and I were left to fend for ourselves.

  “How did you catch malaria?” I asked Catherine.

  “Lots of mosquitoes back home,” she said. “They bite you, something bad gets into your blood, and you get sick.”

  Catherine was eight years younger than I was but a sober-minded little person, and we understood each other. She had developed an interest in art and was beginning to show a real talent for drawing. I found a book of chromos and helped her figure out how to sketch a horse that was supposed to be the beloved Penelope.

  We braved the blustery Chicago weather, but we’d both grown up in Wisconsin winters and weren’t bothered by the plunging temperatures. Mama was right; the cold weather perked her right up. Catherine had come without a warm winter coat, but a friend of Aunt Ollie’s passed along a bright red coat her daughter had outgrown, along with a stylish hat. I persuaded my sister to pose for me in that coat and hat, sprawled on a green baize settee in the parlor. I enjoyed working with the bold reds and emerald greens—I was falling in love with color! I didn’t work fast enough to suit Miss Catherine, but I did succeed in capturing her impatient expression.

  Meanwhile, Catherine had fastened her affections on Aunt Ollie’s cantankerous old parrot, Lucifer, who had generally regarded me with bored silence. My sister stopped drawing horses and borrowed my colored pencils to draw the parrot, which preened and posed for her. He must have been starved for attention.

  By spring she was almost completely recovered, and I registered her to attend the nearby public school for the rest of the year. It would give her something to do, and she would be with girls her own age.

  “How was school today?” I asked after the first week.

  Catherine gave me a look with one eyebrow raised. “School is school,” she said with a shrug, and I knew just what she meant. “How was yours?”

  “About the same,” I admitted. “Dull.”

  I’d read that exciting things were happening in the Paris art world. Mattie and I had gone to see the exhibit of work by French artists whose names we’d heard, but our teachers hadn’t even mentioned the exhibit or suggested that we see it. They insisted that most contemporary European painters weren’t accomplishing anything worth much, and that we should study the Old Masters and learn from them. I saw that the other students in my classes seemed to be stuck more or less where they were when we started, and I recognized that I was getting better. But what, exactly, did that mean?

  “Sometimes I wonder if I’m learning as much as I should at the Institute,” I told Catherine.

  “You’re probably smarter than everybody, Georgie,” my sister declared with an airy wave of her hand. “Maybe you should go someplace else.”

  Maybe she was right. None of the teachers—not even Mr. Vanderpoel—favored any of the latest trends, like the French Impressionists. Only art produced at least a half century earlier was valued. Mattie and I often discussed our feeling that perhaps we didn’t belong here, but we could not come up with a plan. I kept on doing what I was doing and hoped it would somehow work out. Mattie did, too.

  After a few more weeks, Catherine announced that she was ready to go home. She missed our family and her friends—she’d been much more successful at making fr
iends in Williamsburg than I was. I put her on the train with Lucifer, that raucous parrot, a gift from Aunt Ollie. Why Aunt Ollie thought that was an appropriate gift, I had no idea, but Catherine was delighted, and they made the long trip down to Virginia together.

  June came; Mattie would be going to her family in Boston, and I was ready to leave, too. My plan was to paint and draw, paint and draw, for three months in Virginia, until it was time to return to Chicago for my second year. Mattie suggested that we find a cheap place and room together in the fall, but I knew I could not afford to leave Aunt Ollie and Uncle Charley’s home, no matter how cheap another place might be.

  As the train headed south and the miles rolled by, I felt weighed down by a leaden weariness that had settled in my bones. The clamor of a huge city was exhausting. But that was only part of it. Mr. Vanderpoel had ranked me first in the class and given me several honorable mentions but no awards. The constant pressure—not only to do well, but to do better than everyone else—had worn me out.

  Lulled by the monotonous click-clack of iron wheels on iron rails, I slept. It was as though I hadn’t slept in months. Even after I reached Williamsburg, all I wanted to do was sleep.

  12

  Williamsburg, Virginia—Summer 1906

  IT STARTED WITH A HEADACHE. I HAD NO APPETITE. Then came the fever.

  “You’ve worn yourself out, Georgie,” Mama said. “Take some time and just rest.”

  But resting didn’t help. The headache got worse. The fever climbed higher each day. When the stomach cramps began, Mama knew there was more to it than simple weariness, and she sent Claudie to the clinic to ask the doctor to come by and examine me.