Alice Boughton (14 May 1866 – 21 June 1943) was an early 20th-century American photographer known for her photographs of many literary and theatrical figures of her time. She was a Fellow of
Alfred Stieglitz's
Photo-Secession
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular.
A group of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day in the early 20th century ...
, a circle of photographers whose artistic efforts succeeded in raising photography to a fine art form.
Life
Alice Boughton was born in
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
, New York, on 14 May 1866.
Her parents were Frances Ayres and William H. Boughton, a lawyer in New York.
She studied photography and became a well known portrait photographer in New York by the early 1900s. Outside of her art production she was active in Feminist and Socialist causes utilizing photography as a form of personal expression.
Being active in the Feminist scene Alice was a prominent member of the movement known as
New Woman
The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century and had a profound influence well into the 20th century. In 1894, Irish writer Sarah Grand (1854–1943) used the term "new woman" in an influential article, to refer to ...
. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to help overcome that stereotype women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman". Artists like Boughton then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives."
From at least 1920 until her death, Boughton shared her residences with artist and art teacher
Ida C. Haskell (1861–1932). Haskell is known to have been an instructor at Pratt while Käsebier and Boughton studied there. When Boughton traveled to Europe in 1926, Haskell, her partner, accompanied her on the trip.
Photography career
]
In the 1880s, Boughton began studying art and photography at the
Pratt School of Art and Design. It was there that she met fellow student
Gertrude Käsebier, with whom she later studied in Paris. Käsebier also employed her an assistant in her studio, most likely at the same time Boughton was studying at Pratt.
In 1890, she opened her own portrait studio on East
23rd Street in New York, which she maintained for the next forty years. In 1904, she sent a letter to
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
that listed a studio address on
Madison Avenue, indicating that she established or used more than one studio for at least a brief period.
Around 1901, Boughton studied art in Rome and photography in Paris, where she worked in Käsebier’s summer studio. She won an honorable mention for her work at the Turin International Decorative and Fine Arts Exhibition in 1902.
Although Boughton became one of the most distinguished portrait photographers of New York during her time, she also dabbled in other areas of photography such as landscapes and child photography. She did many landscapes in this country and Europe including the famous Rockefeller estate
Kykuit
Kykuit ( ), known also as the John D. Rockefeller Estate, is a 40-room historic house museum in Pocantico Hills, a hamlet in the town of Mount Pleasant, New York 25 miles north of New York City. The house was built for oil tycoon and Rockefelle ...
at
Pocantico Hills, New York
Pocantico Hills is a hamlet in the Westchester County town of Mount Pleasant, New York, United States.
The Rockefeller family estate, anchored by Kykuit, the family seat built by John D. Rockefeller Sr., is located in Pocantico Hills, as is the ad ...
. Continually she produced studies of children, as well as female nudes in allegorical or natural settings. Among her more famous works are portraits of
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into the U.S. the drama techniques of realism, earlier ...
,
Albert Pinkham Ryder
Albert Pinkham Ryder (March 19, 1847 – March 28, 1917) was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality. While his art shared an emphasis on subtle variations of ...
,
George Arliss
George Arliss (born Augustus George Andrews; 10 April 1868 – 5 February 1946) was an English actor, author, playwright, and filmmaker who found success in the United States. He was the first British actor to win an Academy Award – which he ...
,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as ''Treasure Island'', ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll a ...
and
Agnes Lawrence Pelton
Agnes Lawrence Pelton (1881–1961) was a Modernism, modernist painter who was born in Germany and moved to the United States as a child. She studied art in the United States and Europe. She made portraits of Puebloans, Pueblo Native Americans, de ...
. Her portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson was an inspiration for
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more ...
's own portrait of the writer.
Relationship with Stieglitz
As Boughton's photography career grew she became noticed by famous photographers in her field, like
Alfred Stieglitz. It is not known when she met Stieglitz, but it is clear he knew of and admired her work by 1902 when he included two of her works in the inaugural exhibition at his
Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession
Little is a synonym for small size and may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''Little'' (album), 1990 debut album of Vic Chesnutt
* ''Little'' (film), 2019 American comedy film
*The Littles, a series of children's novels by American author John P ...
in New York City. This relationship continued for many years as in 1906, Boughton was appointed by Stieglitz as a Fellow of the
Photo-Secession
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular.
A group of photographers, led by Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day in the early 20th century ...
. The Photo-Secession artists worked to "secede" from what they thought was the mainstream art of the time. The following year Stieglitz gave her, along with fellow photographers C. Yarnall Abbot and William B. Dyer, an exhibition at the Little Galleries. In 1909 she had six of her photographs and an essay called “Photography, A Medium of Expression” published in Stieglitz's journal ''
Camera Work
''Camera Work'' was a quarterly photographic journal published by Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. It presented high-quality photogravures by some of the most important photographers in the world, with the goal to establish photography as a ...
'' (No 26, April, 1909).
While Stieglitz was promoting and including her work in his exhibitions, Boughton was also receiving recognition for her photography from other major independent exhibitions around the world, including shows in London, Paris, Vienna, The Hague and New York.
Later life
In 1931, Boughton closed her studio and discarded thousands of prints.
She moved permanently to the home in Brookhaven, Long Island, that she shared with Haskell.
Boughton died of
pneumonia
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severity ...
on 21 June 1943.
Her works are in the permanent collections of the
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
, the British
National Portrait Gallery, the
George Eastman House
The George Eastman Museum, also referred to as ''George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film'', the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in ...
, the
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Amon may refer to:
Mythology
* Amun, an Ancient Egyptian deity, also known as Amon and Amon-Ra
* Aamon, a Goetic demon
People Momonym
* Amon of Judah ( 664– 640 BC), king of Judah
Given name
* Amon G. Carter (1879–1955), American pu ...
, the
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
, the
Minneapolis Institute of Art
The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United State ...
s, the
University of Michigan Museum of Art
The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan with is one of the largest university art museums in the United States. Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alumni Memorial Hall ori ...
, the
Hood Museum of Art
The Hood Museum of Art is owned and operated by Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. The first reference to the development of an art collection at Dartmouth dates to 1772, making the collection among the o ...
, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
, the
Princeton University Art Museum
The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 113,000 works o ...
, and others.
Work and publications
A collection of her portraits, ''Photographing the Famous'', was published in 1928, and included
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
,
Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe (; May 27, 1819 – October 17, 1910) was an American author and poet, known for writing the " Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism ...
,
Henry James
Henry James ( – ) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the ...
,
Walter de la Mare
Walter John de la Mare (; 25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) was an English poet, short story writer, and novelist. He is probably best remembered for his works for children, for his poem "The Listeners", and for a highly acclaimed selection of ...
,
G. K. Chesterton,
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (russian: link=no, Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в; – 18 June 1936), popularly known as Maxim Gorky (russian: Макси́м Го́рький, link=no), was a Russian writer and social ...
,
John Burroughs
John Burroughs (April 3, 1837 – March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the conservation movement in the United States. The first of his essay collections was ''Wake-Robin'' in 1871.
In the words of his bio ...
,
Ruth St. Denis,
Eleonora Duse and
Yvette Guilbert
Yvette Guilbert (; born Emma Laure Esther Guilbert, 20 January 1865 – 3 February 1944) was a French cabaret singer and actress of the '' Belle Époque''.
Biography
Born in Paris into a poor family as Emma Laure Esther Guilbert, Guilbert b ...
as subjects.
Her work was also published in ''Camera Work'' in 1909.
*
*
References
Further reading
*
*
External Sources
Guide to the Irene Tufts Mead Collection of Alice Boughton Photographs 1904at th
University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center
{{DEFAULTSORT:Boughton, Alice
1866 births
1943 deaths
Photographers from New York City
Fine art photographers
American portrait photographers
Theatrical photographers
People from Brooklyn
Pratt Institute alumni
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
19th-century American photographers
20th-century American photographers
20th-century American women photographers
LGBT photographers from the United States
19th-century American women photographers