Lucia Fairchild Fuller's "Lost" Woman's Building Mural

Abstract

Charlene G. Garfinkle For more than ninety-two years, the Blow-Me-Down Grange in Plainfield, New Hampshire, has had a large-scale oil painting, with clear, bright colors, fastened to the wall at the back of its stage. Grange members knew that it had been painted by a woman artist named Lucia Fairchild Fuller, whose husband loaned the mural to the Grange in April 1900. What they didn't know, however, is that the mural had a very impressive history: it had been displayed at the World's Columbian Exposition. In honor of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Among the exhibition pavilions at the exposition was the Woman's Building, designed and decorated entirely by women under the direction of the Board of Lady Managers. The interior decoration in this building's Hall of Honor (fig. 1) included six individual murals, the most famous being the Modern Woman mural by Mary Cassatt. Its corresponding mural at the end of the hall, Primitive Woman, was painted by Mary MacMonnies. The four side murals were Art, Science and Literature by Lydia Field Emmet, The Republic's Welcome to Her Daughters by Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Arcadia by Amanda Brewster Sewell, and Women of Plymouth (fig. 2) by Lucia Fairchild Fuller. Until recently, all of the murals had been presumed lost or destroyed. But nearly one hundred years after its execution, one of these murals, The Women of Plymouth, has been located and identified for the historic treasure that it is. Lucia Fairchild Fuller (1870/2-1924) studied at the Cowles Art School in Boston and later at the New York Art Students League with William Merritt Chase and the muralist H. Siddons Mowbray. She had intended to become a muralist herself, but financial problems in the mid-1890s prompted her to find a more lucrative specialization. She eventually became a well-known miniaturist and was instrumental in the resurgence of this particular art form at the turn of the century.' In early 1893, Fuller had received a commission to paint one of the side murals intended for the Hall of Honor of the Woman's Building. Although details regarding the commission of the Cassatt and MacMonnies tympana murals and the Sherwood and Emmet side murals are well documented in correspondence of the Board of Lady Managers, no reference is made to the Sewell and Fuller murals prior to their completion and installation. Sherwood, Emmet, and Sewell probably received their commissions through their connection to Candace Wheeler, the art director of the Woman's Building, and her daughter, Dora Wheeler Keith, who painted the ceiling decoration of the library