Education
Emmet was given her first art lessons as a child by her older sister Rosina. Emmet and Rosina went on to attend the Académie Julian in Paris, France in 1884-1885. The Emmet family had suffered severe economic setbacks in the aftermath of the Civil War. The sisters' were able to study abroad only after receiving an inheritance from their cousin, Bache Whitlock. However, the Emmets were disappointed with Julian's, and Rosina commented that the admission standards were "so low that it is not very inspiring. If they (instructors) critisized conscientiously they would punch holes through some of the vile paintings and make them begin from drawing casts." The Emmets did hold a high opinion of at least one of their instructors, Tony Robert-Fleury, whom Lydia found to be "so much brisker and more severe and decided, besides being very inspiring."
After returning to New York, the Emmet sisters, and their cousin Ellen, became students of notable American painter and instructor William Merritt Chase. During her tenure in New York, Emmet also studied with such artists as: Henry Siddons Mowbray, Kenyon Cox and Robert Reid. She continued her training in Paris with William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Louis-Joseph-Raphaël Collin, Tony Robert-Fleury, and the American sculptor and painter Frederick William MacMonnies. She worked mainly in the mediums of watercolor and oil.
While studying in Europe, Emmet and her cousin Ellen joined a summer colony of American artists, including John Leslie Breck and Theodore Robinson, at Hotel Baudy near Claude Monet's home in Giverny, France.
Read more about this topic: Lydia Field Emmet
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“What education is to the individual man, revelation is to the human race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man, and revelation is education that has come, and is still coming to the human race.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)