Art and Handicraft in the Woman's Building (1894)
Maud Howe Elliott's official survey of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition records what Preuschen showed at the Woman's Building in Chicago. Her mention is a single sentence inside a long chapter, so what is given below is the passage that contains it — the survey working along the walls of the German section, which is what makes the sentence legible.
Where to find it
Maud Howe Elliott, ed., Art and Handicraft in the Woman's Building of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), p. 249.
The text
Among the landscapes1 M. von Keudell's delicately executed "Bluemli's Alp" deserves attention, and Mrs. Begas Parmentier's study of Venice is a charming composition. Frau Von Preuschen's "Elaine" represents the lily maid of Astolat lying in her flower-strewn barge2. We must also commend3 Clara Lobedan's "Italian Grapes," and the works of Hildegard Lehnert, Frau Kallmorgen, and Fraulein Ley.
Notes
Identifications, period context, and points where the original carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the source.
- ↑Among the landscapes — She was hung with the landscapes, not the figure subjects. A small curatorial fact that would be hard to recover any other way.
- ↑"Elaine" represents the lily maid of Astolat lying in her flower-strewn barge — Elliott's name for the picture — but not the one it was exhibited under. The Official Catalogue of the Woman's Building lists it as no. 98 in the Rotunda: "Titian's Pupil and Irene von Spilimberg in the Gondola of Death," entered by "Von Preuschen, Mrs. Hermine, Hockendorf." Elliott renamed it after Tennyson's lily maid, and did the same to its neighbours — the catalogue's "Alp Scene, Switzerland" becomes "Bluemli's Alp" in her text. The subject is Irene di Spilimbergo, the young Venetian said to have been Titian's pupil, lying in state on a funeral gondola. Thieme-Becker records the painting at the museum in Metz. (The Art Journal, 1890)
- ↑We must also commend — She is listed without explanation, among names the compiler assumed her readers would recognise. That assumption is the point: in 1894 she needed no gloss in an American reference book. In English she now needs one entirely.