Queer Places:
The Wren’s Nest, 1050 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd, Atlanta, GA 30310
Pontalba Buildings, 500 St Ann St, New Orleans, LA 70116
Cox College, 3667 Main St, College Park, GA 30337
Académie Colarossi, 10 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, 75006 Paris
70 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, 75006 Paris
Bryant Park Studios, 80 W 40th St, New York, NY 10018
552 Cobb St, Athens, GA 30606
98 Chestnut St, Boston, MA 02108
High Rock Hotel, 9 Main St, Ogunquit, ME 03907
Oconee Hill Cemetery
Athens, Clarke County, Georgia, USA
Lucy
May Stanton (May 22, 1875 – March 19, 1931) was an American painter. She made
landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, but Stanton is best known for the
portrait miniatures she painted. Her works are in the National Portrait
Gallery in Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where
Self-Portrait in the Garden
(1928) and Miss Jule (1926) are part of the museum's permanent
collection.[1]
Stanton was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the first of two daughters of William
Lewis Stanton and Frances Louisa Cleveland Megee Stanton.[2][a]
William had a wholesale business selling food, some of which came from the
Stanton and Megee farms; machinery; lumber; and imported pottery from Europe.
The family lived in the "fashionable"
West End district of Atlanta on Gordon Street (now Ralph D. Abernathy
Boulevard) in a Greek Revival house. A year after Lucy May Stanton was born,
her sister Willie Marion Stanton was born. The family's summers were often
spent in the mountains of North Georgia at Lucy's grandparent's farms. The
Stantons spent many winters in the
Pontalba Buildings of New Orleans, where William managed the import of
Caribbean sugar, molasses, and rice.[2]
Lucy May Stanton was given a set of oil paints and began to learn to paint
when she was seven years old.
Mme Sally Seago,[2][3][b]
a French artist in New Orleans, gave Stanton lessons in New Orleans.[2][3]
In Atlanta, she lived across the street from
Wren's Nest,[2]
the home of author and journalist
Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote the Uncle Remus stories and shared his
stories with her and her sister,[3][5]
Willie Marion Stanton.[6]
Her mother, Frances Megee Stanton, died in 1888.[2]
In 1889–1890 she took a tour of Europe with her father and studied watercolor
painting in
Venice.[4]
Lucy and Willie were educated at the Southern Female College (now known as
Cox
College) in
LaGrange, Georgia where Lucy graduated in 1893 with the highest honors in
Greek and Latin.[2][4][c]
She studied with another female French teacher, Mme Ada Autrie.[3]
Her father married Sallie Cox, a music instructor and member of the family
that owned the school. Lucy's early miniature portraits were ones made of her
sister in 1895 and another that was a copy of a family miniature. Her early
miniatures were made with a stippling technique.[2]
In the two years following her graduation she worked as an art teacher at
New Ebenezer College and as an assistant to Atlanta artist James P. Field who
had been her art instructor at Southern Female College. During that time she
began painting portrait miniatures, receiving her first commission in 1896, a
portrait of the opera singer
Adelina Patti. Later that year, she left for Paris where she studied
painting, etching, and sculpture with the American-born artist
Augustus Koopman and miniature painting with American artist,
Virginia Richmond Reynolds. Stanton painted in Normandy in the summers
with Koopman and other students. Koopman taught her to paint with originality
and Reynolds introduced Stanton to parallel brush strokes, a new technique at
the time. She also studied anatomy at the
Sorbonne;
took classes at two independent art schools in Paris which admitted women, the
Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the
Académie Colarossi;[1][2]
and studied with
James Abbott McNeill Whistler.[3]
Stanton, who grew up in Atlanta during its recovery from the Civil War,
created works of art that represented her southern heritage, including a set
of scenes of African American life that she called her "Little Murals" series,
that included Loading Cotton, Negroes Resting, and Aunt
Liza's Porch. She exhibited the first miniature portrait of an African
American in an 1899 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition. She also
painted portraits of the Georgian
Howell
Cobb, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Linton Ingraham
who was an ex-slave, which are in the collections of the
United States House of Representatives and the Museum of American Trade in
Milton, Massachusetts, respectively. Her painting North Carolina Mountain
Woman is in the collection of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.[3]
She returned to the United States in 1898 and began her career as an artist
in earnest, exhibiting both there and in Europe.[1][2]
She taught at a YMCA night school, gave private lessons, and had a studio in
Atlanta.[2][3]
In 1898 she made her first painting of an African American, Aunt Nicey
Tuller. She received commissions to paint portraits of influential people,
including Charles A. Collier, was had been the mayor of Atlanta. It hands in
the Atlanta City Hall. She taught again at what is now Cox College.[2]
Between 1901 and 1902, Stanton and her sister, Willie Marion,[d]
lived in Bryant Park Studios, across from
Bryant
Park. Lucy gave private art lessons and at the Episcopal Deaconess
Hospital trained as a practical charity nurse. Stanton met naturalist
John Burroughs, took canoe trips to Maine, and visited friends in Boston,
where in 1902 she exhibited in the second annual
Copley Society of Art exhibition. More than 800 paintings were rejected by
exhibition jurors for the show.[2]
Stanton had an extended visit to her father, stepmother, and her children
in Los Angeles beginning in the Spring of 1904. In 1905 she traveled to Paris
with her friend and fellow artist Polly Smith. She had a studio at 70 Rue
Notre-Dame des Champs in Paris,[2][3]
where she had returned to study portrait painting with
Lucien Simon and
Jacques-Émile Blanche. Her Mother and Child, a miniature portrait
of her sister and nephew painted in 1905, won a Blue Ribbon the following year
when it was exhibited at the New Salon of the
Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. From 1909, she maintained a studio and a
small house in
Athens, Georgia near the home of her sister.[1][2]
She then had studios in North Carolina in the Great Smokey Mountains and then
in New York.[3]
From 1916 to 1926 she lived and worked primarily in
Boston, at
the time a center of miniaturist art. She had a studio on
Beacon Hill and spent her summers in
Ogunquit, Maine.[3]
She made a watercolor portrait of Joel Chandler Harris about 1914, after he
had died. In 1917 it won the Pennsylvania Society of Miniature Painters' Medal
of Honor.[5]
She also taught art in several private schools there including
Milton Academy and
Dana Hall. Stanton settled permanently in Athens in 1926[3]
where she was active in the civic life of the city, lecturing on art and
organizing exhibitions as well as promoting women's suffrage and campaigning
for the
League of Nations. She was a co-founder of the Georgia Peace Society in
1928.
Stanton caught a chill in March 1931[3]
and subsequently died of pneumonia in an Athens hospital and was buried in the
city's
Oconee Hill Cemetery. She never married.[1][2]
Her papers, correspondence, photographs of family members and her works,
and other relevant documents spanning from 1899 to 1931 are held at the
Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia.[6]
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