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Amelia Rumsey Patterson
(1869–?)
Chrysanthemums
Oil on canvas, 28 × 22 inches
Signed and dated at lower right: “A.R.Patterson ’93”
Inscribed in ink on stretcher verso: “For/Frank M. Acton”
William Gerdts wrote that at the end of the nineteenth century there were
many “women painters of still life from New Jersey exhibiting, but paintings
by few of them have come to light.”1 One such person is Amelia Rumsey Patterson,
whose identity has recently emerged. She was born in Salem, New Jersey, the
fourth and youngest child of prominent local physician Theophilus Patterson
and Caroline Rowe Ware. Some sources state that she exhibited at the Columbian
Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The inscription on the reverse of this floral
still life refers to the artist’s neighbor Frank Miller Acton, who lived across
the street from her in Salem.
Although Patterson was not a prolific artist, she was quite skilled. The Schwarz
Gallery had a meticulously painted trompe l’oeil Still Life with Violin (1886,
private collection) by Patterson that she based on the famous Old Violin (1886,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) by William Michael Harnett (1848–1892),
or more likely the widely circulated chromolithograph of it that Frank Tuchfarber
of Cincinnati published the following year.2 Her Rebecca at the Well (1890)
is in the collection of the Salem County Historical Society.
Copyright ©2005 The Schwarz Gallery
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