Can you name five women artists? In celebration of Women’s History Month, we will shine our Art Spotlight this month on some of the inspiring women artists represented in The Trustees’ Castle Hill collection. We begin with two artists who portrayed members of the Crane family.

Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952) was one of the earliest professional female portraitists in America. Born into a family of successful women artists, she attended the Académie Julien in Paris and the Arts Students League of New York, where she became a protégé of artist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Best known for her portraits of children, she painted in loose, animated brushstrokes while also capturing a directness from her sitters. For the Cranes, she painted the large childhood portrait of Cornelius and Florence Crane, Brother and Sister, in 1914. With studios in New York and Stockbridge, Mass., her remarkable career spanned more than 50 years.

Eveline von Maydell (1890-1962) was a Baltic-German artist who was internationally renowned for her uniquely captivating silhouettes. Von Maydell moved to America in 1922, where she was an artist for New York’s Museum of Natural History, and she gained much notoriety following a 1925 exhibition of her work at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. She reportedly had an astounding, ambidextrous technique that made her a wonder to watch. She portrayed many of her famous contemporaries in silhouette, as well as society families with their children and pets. One of our collection highlights is her 1926 portrait of The Crane Family at Tea, executed with tremendous delicacy and fine detail.