(1873 – 1943)
Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer was a painter and printmaker, best known for her images of Tennessee notables, especially society women and their children. Hergesheimer was the great-great granddaughter of the Philadelphia artist Charles Willson Peale, who named one of his daughters Sophonisba after the Italian woman artist of the Renaissance, Sophonisba Anguissola (1523/35-1625).
Hergesheimer was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where her student works impressed her teachers. She studied for two years at the Philadelphia School of Design and then for four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under William Merritt Chase and Cecilia Beaux. In her first year (1900) she won the prize for perspective, in her second year the prize for animal and figure drawing, and in her third year the prizes for landscape and anatomy. She was judged the best pupil of her senior class and won a three-year Cresson traveling scholarship (1904-1907). She visited Paris and Normandy, Madrid, Germany, Italy, and Holland. In Paris she worked at the Colorossi School and had four paintings chosen to hang at the Paris Salon.
Returning home in 1907, she was commissioned to paint a portrait of Bishop Holland M. McTyeire, the Methodist clergyman who had persuaded Cornelius Vanderbilt to endow what became Vanderbilt University. The commission brought her to Nashville, Tennessee, which became her home for the rest of her life. She exhibited her work extensively in the South and won numerous awards including gold medals at the Appalachian Exposition in 1910 and the Tennessee State Exposition in 1926. She also exhibited at the Philadelphia Sesquicentennial Exhibition in 1926. A lithograph titled “Still Life with Apples” was chosen as one of the “Fine Prints of the Year in 1938.”
Her works are in the collections of Vanderbilt University; Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York; Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania; Tennessee State Museum; and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia.
Above information from the University of Delaware Library, Special Collections Department. http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/graphics/findaids/hergesh.htm. Most of it has been copied here, other than their reference sources and collection, since their original link may or may not be permanent.
