This is a 23 by 17 inch (image area) watercolor painting of a camel with circus tents behind it. The paper on which it is painted measures 24 by 18 and the mat measures 30 by 24. This painting is from her animal alphabet series of watercolors she did between 1930 and 1950. This one dates from around 1935. The backing board has details of where this was exhibited in the 1930s, which includes being shown at the Argent Gallery in New York in 1938 and Rutgers College in 1938. It is in very good condition with some light foxing for which I have accounted with a more moderate price. See the more detailed condition report as well as the photos. It will be shipped for $45 via UPS.

        I recently bought many Clara Stroud watercolors she created from 1930 to 1950, most of  which were depictions of birds and animals that correspond  to letters in the alphabet. This piece she listed under "D" for dromedary, a one hump camel. She had a separate painting she did for camels, with more than one hump.   All of these paintings came from the estate of Clara's niece.

       During the 1920s, just as Ida and Clara were helping to usher in a bold new era for women artists and women's rights, they also found themselves in the midst of a new stage in their own lives. In 1922, Clara and her husband purchased a beautiful sixty-acre farm in the village of Herbertsville, New Jersey, located about five miles inland from the seashore town of Point Pleasant. The fields provided Charles Colvin with ample landing space for his airplane. He ran a company called Pioneer Instruments, and later became rich after designing the altimeter for Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of Saint Louis." Although the townsfolk referred to their home as the "Herbert-Colvin House," Clara called their large tract "Five Miles Out" and "Riverwood Fields," for it stretched out over fields, woodlands, ponds, and meadows. It was bounded by the southern bank of the Manasquan River, just before it swells into a much wider river. The property had a farmhouse built in 1838, plus a carriage house and a water well.

In the autobiographical notebook, Clara prepared for her niece, she chose to assume the third person. Inviting the reader into her home of sixty years, she wrote:

Come, step inside her home. See the wooden floors, scrubby clean. Braided rugs round and oval, and hooked ones, too, are made by the hands of Clara Stroud. They are from old clothes. Her friends say, "I suppose you bought that bright blue coat because you want it in a rug some day" and that is the truth! . . . Over the stove hangs a watercolor Strawberries and Sugar that is how they serve them there. Strawberries freshly picked from the garden, washed, and dipped into powdered sugar. The painting is one of Mrs. Stroud's finest. Her mother, an artist also . . . Across a grassy stretch is the Barn, with its short and long slanting roof. Upstairs has become the gallery . . . it has become known as one of the pleasant things to do at the seashore to drive out to Clara Stroud's Studio . . . Visitors like to view the pictures in the Barn Studio, roam thru the garden, walk around the ponds, and drink from the well.

In 1929, possibly owing to the crash of the stock market, Charles Colvin unexpectedly left Clara and divorce ensued. Yet Clara, who had clearly inherited her mother's resourcefulness and indomitable spirit, quickly adapted to maintaining the farm and gardens by herself. Immediately, she invited her mother to move in with her. During the summer, their world centered around the gardens, of which they kept several types. Visitors would first be welcomed by terraced formal flower gardens leading to a small waterfall and two surrounding ponds. There were also two large rock gardens and a sunken garden. Clara even kept a cranberry bog which she harvested to produce her own sauces. Further from the house, the wildflower gardens were bordered by stone walls and the banks of a small brook. Finally, more than twenty of the acres were fertile fields, sloping toward the river. These fields which extended to the Manasquan river yielded crops of alfalfa and wheat, and sections were dedicated to potatoes and apples. Clara also became widely known for her award-winning crops of strawberries. She wrote, "Many people know me more for my strawberries than for my watercolors."3

The farm was their haven. Clara always called her gardens "God's Gardens," and she referred to herself as one of "God's Gardeners." Visitors were welcomed by lines of verse tacked to her studio door, written by her friend, Myrtle B. Klarman:
During the decade of the Great Depression, Ida spent her winters in a small apartment in Newark in order to be near the Fawcett School. It was Clara's practice, however, to spend the winters traveling and painting in the south largely because her home had no heating system. Throughout the 1930s, she enjoyed taking classes at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a number of different instructors. (5) She spent eleven winters in Florida where she loved painting circus scenes and the local landscape. 

In 1938,she was given a solo exhibition for her southern watercolors at the Argent Galleries in New York. A critic wrote: "In contrast we give you Clara Stroud showing watercolors she made in Florida, at the Argent Galleries. Miss Stroud's colorings are obviously natural, too. But she has organized and edited them into compositions which are vigorous, direct, and powerful as well as brightly decorative. They bespeak the mystery and glamour of the tropics, and something of that sinister quality which somehow seems part of the locale. But more important, they are complete pictures having their own life as artistic organisms apart from their subject." (6)

In 1939, working through the American Artists Professional League, Clara initiated the first "Art Week" exhibition in New Jersey to attract greater attention to the state's artists. Her program was so successful that every state followed in recognizing the first week of November as "Art Week" each year.

With the advent of World War II, enrollment in the Fawcett School became lean. By 1943, Ida resigned from the school, not because of the lack of students, but because she was weakened by a cancer that had been discovered around 1925. Ever-stoic, persevering, and of strong faith, Ida had discovered strength in converting to Christian Science and lived with the disease for many years.

After her mother's passing, Clara traveled even further south, spending the winters of 1944 through 1946 in Mexico. In 1946, she was in Taxco, visiting William Spratling, one of the most influential silver jewelry designers of the 20th century. (7) Each winter, until the mid 1950s, she found a new area to discover and paint, returning to Mexico, but also traveling to Guatemala, the Virgin Islands, throughout the southern United States, and even to Pasadena, California. 

For decades, Clara had been promoting watercolor, with its freshness and vigor, as the medium most indicative of American painting. In 1951, a critic for the Parisian publication, "La Revue Modèrne" commented on the brilliancy of Clara's travel pictures and her leading role in American watercolor painting: "The solidity and luminosity of her watercolors, in which she shows a virtuosity for utilizing the white of the paper, underlines her personality which is counted in the forefront of watercolor painting in the United States." (8) Clara's watercolors of Mexico were also illustrated in the Mexican magazine, Social Review.

From the late 1930s through the early 1960s, Clara had been most active in the American Watercolor Society and American Artists Professional League, exhibiting and winning numerous awards, year after year. In 1950, she was the honorary speaker at the American Watercolor Society's annual awards dinner held at the National Arts Club in New York. She spoke about the success of her Barn Studio summer exhibitions and announced that Ida had requested that all the money she (Ida) had made from her watercolors be donated to the American Watercolor Society to establish an annual prize to the best woman watercolorist. In 1954, the other organization dear to Clara the American Artists Professional League honored her with an award for inspiring leadership in the art interests of New Jersey.

It is a tragic irony that, despite the professional accolades lauded upon the woman who had done more than any other for art in New Jersey, in 1972 the New Jersey Fish, Game, and Wildlife Commission made a formal claim to seize her farm as part of the Department of Environmental Protection's "Green Acres" program. Although she was granted a life tenancy, she still had to pay rent! Clara carried on as if nothing had changed. She tended her flower gardens, painted, taught, and entertained guests. An entry in her journal in 1980 even notes when she planted the winter wheat.

In 1984, Clara was honored as a Life member of the American Watercolor Society. Shortly after, she passed away, at age ninety-four. Her niece, also an artist, made a final visit to Clara's tidy, now quiet, home. It was clear that Clara had left the autobiographical notebook where her niece would easily spot it. It was if Clara had left a long note while out for the day painting or gardening. We all benefit from pouring through that notebook, discovering two lives that made such lasting contributions to American art and to women.

Clara said, "There is good art, bad art . . . It's a matter of taste but it should have the 'basic elements.' It should show draughtsmanship. It is significant if the artist feels deeply and makes his expression with knowledge and skill and intensity. Time is the critic. You are a success, but it is not how much money you make but rather if you achieve the 'basic things' in your work; if you have a message you desire to give, and say it with passion."

Today, that passionate message of these two indomitable spirits lives on as two prestigious annual awards The Clara & Ida Stroud Awards given by both the American Watercolor Society and American Artists Professional League. Further, we are reminded that the most influential force on American art education especially from the 1890s through the World War I era was a "quiet force" led by a few key women painters and craftswomen. Prominent among them are the Strouds.

The very last line of her notebook stated, "Yes, she lives alone and likes it. This is Clara Stroud."