Study for a Portrait by Jessie Willcox Smith

Provenance:
Private Collection, Victoria, British Columbia
By descent to the present Private Collection

Literature:
'The Secret Was About Covers', "Good Housekeeping", November 1917, reproduced page 34 as "Study for a Portrait"
S. Michael Schnessel, "Jessie Willcox Smith", New York, 1977, pages 133, 204

Jessie Willcox Smith was one of the most celebrated American illustrators of the twentieth century. She illustrated over sixty books and created 450 illustrations for periodicals. Her works capture the timeless joys of childhood and motherhood as seen through a woman’s eyes, immortalizing those fleeting moments on print and canvas.

The beginning of the 1900s provided many opportunities for aspiring illustrators, with advances in printing and a growing public demand for art. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the turning point in her career was in 1894 when she attended a class in illustration at the Drexel Institute of Arts and Sciences led by Howard Pyle, who provided the foundation for her future work while offering contacts in the publishing industry. Smith would begin working with leading periodicals, such as "Collier’s", "The Ladies Home Journal", "Scribner’s Magazine", and "Good Housekeeping". She became universally recognized when offered an exclusive contract to illustrate for "Collier’s" in 1904, where she developed the subject for which she is best known: her idealized and playful representation of children.

During the early 1920s, she devoted much of her time to portrait painting. "Study for a Portrait" was likely painted in West Mount Airy, where Smith built a home and studio, called Cogshill, her spacious studio facing one of the blossoming gardens. There, she focused on her various book and magazine projects and painted several children’s portraits each year. In a productive year, Smith would paint more than a dozen portraits on commission. Her fees were quite substantial for the time: $500 for a bust portrait, $1,000 for a full-length portrait, and negotiable fees for portraits featuring multiple subjects.

The children were from the Cogshill area and were part of some of the wealthier families in Philadelphia. She allowed them to wander the lush gardens while photographing them with her Kodak box camera. The children’s appearance became the trademarks of Smith’s young models, characterized by their neatly combed hair and expensive dresses and uniforms. Despite their refined look, they embodied the American boy and girl next door. Cogshill not only offered interesting nooks and corners where children loved to play, but Smith “would watch and study them, and try to get them to take unconsciously the positions that I happened to be wanting for a picture. All the models I have ever had for my illustrations are just the adorable children of my kind friends, who would lend them to me for a little while.”

In this work, a young girl with short blonde hair steps forward in a doorway, peering behind a green arched door. Her elegant appearance reflects her parents' refined taste: she is dressed in a pristine white dress with long sleeves and a voluminous skirt, paired with white socks and shoes. Smith’s dramatic colour contrast is on full display, juxtaposing her pale form with the darker green hues of the door and vegetation behind her. The wisteria, with its lavender-blue flowers, delicate leaves and snaking vines, forms a canopy above her head, framing the figure within the composition. The green arched door was a recurrent motif in Smith’s works. It initially appeared in an illustration of the same name from "The Child in the Garden", published in the edition of December 1903 of "Scribner’s".

The young girl is cast in shadows as she steps behind the door, with the play of sunlight reflecting on the wall while casting interesting patterns on the ground. Smith’s mastery of light and shadow is remarkable. Many of her portraits were, in fact, painted outdoors, since according to Smith, it offered “the natural background for childhood. Given leaves, and flowers and sunshine, which is theirs by right, their little faces glow in the full light as though illumined from within.” Despite the doorway dominating the composition, the viewer’s gaze is inevitably drawn to the small, lone figure at the centre, looking timidly straightforward as she ventures into the slanting light.

Smith was a prolific illustrator and is today best known for the covers she created for "Good Housekeeping" spanning fifteen years. The editor officially introduced Smith as their next cover artist in an article from November 1917 alongside black-and-white pictures of some of her works, including "Study for a Portrait". The article draws attention to Smith’s vivid depiction of the child as making “one fairly long to reach out and touch her somewhere between neat white toes and drooping curls.”