AVAILABLE PAINTINGS BY PAULINE PALMER

Pauline Palmer (née Lennards in McHenry, Illinois 1867 - Trondheim, Norway 15 August 1938) was one of Chicago's early twentieth-century portrait and landscape painters who became one of the Midwest's most active and energetic exponents of impressionism. Palmer's father, Nicholas Lennards, a Woodstock, Illinois merchant, encouraged her to pursue art. Pauline studied at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1893 and 1898, including a one-month session with William Merritt Chase in 1897, and further temporary instruction with Frank Duveneck. In 1899, her work was compared to that of Chase: "She draws well, her colors are true and values well rendered; all the result of persistent and careful study." (M. M., 1899, p. 217). Later that year, Palmer enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi in Paris, where Raphaël Collin was one of her teachers, and studied privately with Richard Miller. She made her debut in the Paris Salon of 1903, on which occasion Guillaumina Agnew wrote about Palmer's popularity in The Sketch Book (July 1903): "Mrs. Palmer was the favorite among all the American artists here. . . ." At the St. Louis Universal Exposition, Palmer won a bronze medal for three works, one of which, The White Shawl, was illustrated in Paul Schulze's memorial article in 1939. An elegantly dressed woman is reading, seated in a profile pose that recalls paintings by Mary Cassatt. Later in 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, her painting The Ledge was on view.