Anne Goldthwaite

Montgomery County native Anne Wilson Goldthwaite (1869-1944) was a painter, printmaker, and activist. Her paintings, which often depict scenes from the rural South, are on display at some of the nation’s most highly regarded museums. As an activist, she participated in the woman suffrage movement, and she advocated for women artists at a time when professional opportunities for women were limited.   

Goldthwaite was born on June 28, 1869, in Montgomery, Montgomery County, to Richard Wallach Goldthwaite and Lucy Boyd Armistead. She was the eldest of four siblings. Both her father and her grandfather, George Thomas Goldthwaite, served in the Confederacy; the latter represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate. She spent much of her childhood in Dallas, Texas, but when her parents died in the 1880s, Goldthwaite and her siblings returned to Montgomery, where extended family cared for them until they reached maturity. By her mid-20s, Goldthwaite, who had demonstrated a talent for sketching, expressed to her family an interest in making a career in art. Her uncle, a cotton broker in New York, offered to bring her there and support her as she studied and prepared to become a professional artist. She accepted this offer, and although she routinely visited her native state of Alabama, her primary residence was New York City, where she gained acclaim as a painter and printmaker. She exhibited portraits, still-life paintings, southern scenes, and limited-edition etchings and lithographs at New York galleries, and the sales allowed her to support herself.

Goldthwaite initially studied painting independently with New York artists. Understanding the art market of New York and the limited opportunities for women, she knew she would be well served to develop a range of skills, and she also learned the techniques of printmaking. Hoping to further refine these skills, around 1905 she applied to the National Academy of Design in New York City. She was the sole woman admitted to the etching class and was later admitted to other classes that expanded her skills, building her reputation as a serious professional. During the early years of her art training, she described in her memoirs many instances in which she was patronized or overlooked because of her gender.

New Year's Night–Cafe Versailles

As the next step on her art journey, she traveled to Paris so that she could experience firsthand the center of the international art world. She arrived in France in 1906 and immediately began to seek out opportunities to gain exposure to the styles of Post-Impressionism and early Modernism that filled the salons and galleries of Paris in the first decade of the new century. She saw the work of such noted artists as Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso, along with scores of others. Beginning in 1909, she was instrumental in the formation of a group known as the Académie Moderne, a group of artists whose work was heavily influenced by the styles of artists such as Matisse and Cézanne. Modernist painters, such as the renowned artist Charles Guérin, often joined Académie sessions to critique the works of the group and to discuss the principles of Modernist art.

In addition to making art, Anne expended considerable energy on promoting the rights of women, and she particularly supported organizations that worked to expand opportunities for women artists. In Paris, she produced work for display in the many exhibitions that took place each year, including the juried Salon, an annual exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. She was included in the Salon in October 1908, and in April 1909 was included in the exhibition of the Société des Artistes Français. The following year, she became the president of the American Women’s Art Association of Paris.

The Church on the Hill

After seven years in Paris, Goldthwaite returned to New York in 1913 and set up a home and studio at 20 West 10th Street, where she resided for the remainder of her life. In that year, she contributed to America’s introduction to European Modernism in the 1913 Armory Show, exhibiting The Church on the Hill (The House on the Hill), which she had painted in France in 1910. The exhibition was formally known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art and was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It was the first time that many of the European Modernists familiar to Goldthwaite from her years in Paris were introduced to American audiences. Beginning in 1922, Goldthwaite was hired as an instructor at the Art Students League, where she taught until her death in 1944.

Goldthwaite assumed other positions in organizations that championed the work of women artists and supported woman suffrage. In 1915, she participated in an exhibition of work by women artists at New York’s Macbeth Gallery titled Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Woman Suffrage Campaign. In a radio interview recorded in 1934, Goldthwaite spoke of the difficulties women had historically faced, and continued to face, as they sought careers as artists. She argued that, rather than reserving praise for women who paint like men, audiences should come to regard art on the basis of what is good, regardless of the artist’s gender. She was eventually elected president of the New York Society of Women Artists in 1937 and 1938.

Anne Goldthwaite Watercolor

Goldthwaite was highly prolific over her long career, creating oil paintings, watercolors, limited-edition etchings and lithographs, and even a small body of sculpted clay figures. By far her most recognized works were her paintings depicting the people and places she encountered on her summer visits to her home state of Alabama and to other places in the South. Her earliest efforts were the sketches that she made as a young woman in Montgomery depicting the urban architecture and street life of the city. She documented scenes and people who have long passed into history in areas such as the Boguehomme area of Montgomery, originally a territorial-era trading post frequented by transplants from the Northeast and Atlantic seaboard as well as the Native Americans who were the original inhabitants of central Alabama. (The area was located near the current campus of Alabama State University, south of the State Capitol in downtown Montgomery.) She often depicted predominantly Black communities at their work or leisure, and she treated these subjects honestly, without any judgment or patronizing.

The Road to Tuskegee

During the Great Depression, Goldthwaite was awarded two commissions from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Section of Painting and Sculpture to create post office murals: The Letter Box (1937) in Atmore, Escambia County, and The Road to Tuskegee (1939) in Tuskegee, Macon County. In that decade and the one that followed, her visits to Alabama included time at the summer camps hosted by the Dixie Art Colony, led by John Kelly Fitzpatrick, a prominent artist and teacher in central Alabama. She worked there alongside younger artists who would have appreciated the sophistication of her style as well as her natural accessibility as an experienced art instructor. The Colony artists painted primarily rural landscapes and people, which gave her a chance to expand her range of imagery depicting the state. These varied southern themes span the full course of her oeuvre and suggest that she felt most “at home” when she was among the people of her youth, capturing the range of activity in their everyday lives.

By the end of her life, Goldthwaite’s work had been shown in more than 100 group exhibitions, and she had been honored with more than 25 one-person shows. She produced more than 300 etchings and lithographs, and a comprehensive catalogue of her print works was published in 1982. Her paintings and prints are found in many museum collections in the United States, including those of the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, the Mobile Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery holds more than 500 examples of her paintings and prints.

Goldthwaite died on January 29, 1944, in New York City, and was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery. She never married or had children. In the fall of 1944, M. Knoedler and Company in New York held a memorial exhibition honoring the artist. In its catalogue, Harry Wehle, a former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and close friend, noted Goldthwaite's contribution to American art education after 23 years as a teacher at the Art Students League, and her active role in the cause of securing artists' rights. With regard to her art practice, he observed  that she visited  Alabama and the South annually preferring  the hot, bright summer months, when, "the South presented its most characteristic aspect."