Photographer_________

Eva Watson-Schütze, New York

Title:

Untitled

Date:

c1912

Medium:

Platinum Print on original plain mounts

Size of Image:

7 15/16 x 6 1/4 inches

Size of Mount:

Condition:

Rich warm tonal image sharp and clean, mount shows light aging/soiling with some light foxing and handling, corners/edges rubbed/bumped, photographers monogram signature on image at top right corner.

Other:

Exceptional vintage c1912 platinum print portrait of a young girl sitting in a flower patch by American photographer and painter Eva Watson-Schütze (1867-1935).  This image is a variant companion piece to the portrait of the same young lady taken at the same session which was acquired in 1977 for the Photography Collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Eva Watson-Schütze (1867-1935) occupies a seminal position in the history of photography and the fine arts.   Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Eva Lawrence Watson enrolled at the age of sixteen in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, studying with painter/photographer Thomas Eakins.  Her early endeavors in photography began around 1890 when she embraced the Pictorialist influences of expression.  She corresponded with photographer Frances Benjamin Johnson regarding the importance of women in photography during this time and was included in the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1898.  By 1899 she was elected to the prestigious Photographic Society of Philadelphia where she was included on the jury during the following year’s salon with jurors Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Kasebier, Frank Eugene and Clarence H. White.  

She married Martin Schütze in 1901 who took a position at the University of Chicago which launched her long association with the University and the Chicago arts community.  At the same time, she was elected to membership in The Linked Ring, the “Brotherhood” of photographers founded in England by Henry Peach Robinson, George Davidson and Henry van der Weyde in 1892.  Although the group had exhibited works by women, it did not extend membership until 1900 with Gertrude Käsebier as their first female member before Schütze.  

In 1902 she is known to have corresponded with Alfred Stieglitz about the formation of an American based organization that would similarly champion the photographic arts joining him that year as a founding member of the Photo-Secession.  She contributed both images and writing to the Stieglitz  publication Camera Work.  It is about this time that Watson-Schütze discovered Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Colony and the rich artistic community of the Catskill Mountains in New York.  From 1910 until about 1925 she and spent her summer and fall months at their New York home they called “High Meadows” nearby.  She photographed many of the artists and acquaintances from the area using a dark room graciously provided by Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead and Jane Byrd McCall Whitehead, founders of the Byrdcliffe Arts & Crafts Colony.  She tapered off her photographic endeavors around 1920, taking up painting and drawing during this time.

In Chicago by 1929, she had become the Director of The Renaissance Society a museum associated with the University of Chicago where she spearheaded early exhibitions of the likes of Picasso, Braque, Chagall, Arp, Miró, and Brancusi.  She held the position until her death in 1935.