Born Jennie Christine in Elgin, Illinois,
she officially changed her name to Jane Peterson in 1909 after
her first success as an artist. Her family was of humble background
but certainly not poverty stricken. She became famous for a wide
range of works from landscapes to still-lives that blend Impressionist
and Expressionist movements. As a woman, her life was much more
independent and adventurous than those of most of her contemporaries,
and she traveled widely to paint including joining Louis Comfort
Tiffany on a continental painting expedition in his private railway
car.
Peterson does not belong to any particular
school of painting, but combined techniques and styles from a
variety of teachers and prevalent styles. However, many of her
early works were strongly Impressionist, much influenced by Joaquin
Sorrola y Bastida, a Madrid painter under whose teaching she abandoned
dark tonalities for the spontaneous methods of applying paint
characteristic of Impressionism.
At age 18, Peterson, with a gift from
her mother of $300, then a substantial sum of money, enrolled
in the Pratt Institute in New York City and studied with Arthur
Wesley Dow, graduating in 1901. She also studied at the Art Students
League with Frank DuMond and held several teaching positions that
took her to Boston and Maryland. Subsequently she studied in Paris
and lived around the corner from Gertrude and Leo Stein, who invited
Peterson to many of their soirees where she met leading intellectuals
including Picasso and Matisse.
She studied in Venice and in London
with Frank Brangwyn and in Madrid with Joaquin Sorolla, whom she
accompanied in 1919 to the United States when he received a commission
from Tiffany to paint his portrait. Tiffany's home at Laurelton
Hall, Oyster Bay, New York had lavish gardens that reminded visitors
of Claude Monet's gardens at Giverny. Peterson did paintings of
this garden that strongly resembled work by Monet's followers
at Giverny.
In 1916, she exhibited work she had
painted in the Pacific Northwest while traveling with Louis Tiffany.
By 1916, she was also doing much painting of colorful beach scenes
with Maurice Prendergast and went on to paint many landscapes
and seascapes. She completed many floral subjects, which were
inspired by the gardens of her summer house in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Many of her beach and pier scenes were from painting trips to
artist colonies along the Massachusetts coast.
Her first successful American exhibition
was in 1909 at the St. Botolph Club in Boston, and from that time
her work was the subject of over 50 one-person shows. In 1925,
she married Moritz Bernard Philip, a lawyer and art patron.
Source:
Charlotte Rubinstein, American Women Artists
