Ethel Reed

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n96043051

found: Artists of the book in Boston, 1890-1910, 1985: p. 100 (Reed, Ethel; artist, illustrator; b. Newburyport, Mass., March 13, 1874)

found: Wikipedia, 7 July 2016 (Ethel Reed (born Newburyport, Massachusetts March 13,1874; died 1912); internationally recognized American graphic artist)

Grove Art online:

American illustrator and poster designer. Her father Edgar was a photographer who had studios in Newburyport and Franklin, MA. Ethel seemed to have been influenced by her mother, Mary Elizabeth. She told The Bookman in late 1895 that she and her mother planned to go to Paris together so she could study there. They later went to Ireland and England. Reed was mainly self-taught, but she did study briefly at the Cowles School of Art in Boston and took drawing lessons with the noted miniature painter Laura Coombs Hills (1859–1952), posing for one of Hills’s first miniatures on ivory (Portrait of a Girl, 1880). Reed was quite beautiful and may have been introduced by Hills to Fred Holland Day, who photographed her in The Gainsborough Hat (1895–8). Landscapes painted by Reed were exhibited with the Boston Arts Students’ Association in 1894, but she is best known as a poster artist (see fig.). Working in the Art Nouveau style, Reed’s posters were also influenced by Japanese prints. Between February 1895 and July 1896 she created around 20 posters. In a field primarily dominated by such men as William Bradley (1868–1962), Maxfield Parrish, and Edward Penfield (1855–1925), Reed’s work was positively received. She worked for several Boston publishers during this period, doing illustrations for the Boston Herald, Lamson Wolffe, Louis Prang, and Copeland & Day.

Her most common subjects were young girls or women with flowers, particularly lilies or poppies. These images were reported to be self-portraits, and while many critics read her work as erotically charged, others interpreted it as having delicate, feminine qualities. Reed was the only woman to be featured as the subject of an article in The Poster, a London illustrated journal. In this article, published in 1898, the French critic S. C. de Soissons wrote that Reed’s success was because ‘she sees with her own and not masculine eyes, one sees in it a woman, full of sweetness and delicacy...’ This was a typical opinion of the time as the decorative arts were viewed as feminine and the fine arts as masculine. Women were also thought to be the natural choice for depicting women, children, and flowers. Some of Reed’s most critically acclaimed work appeared in a book of poetry by Louise Chandler Moulton, In Childhood’s Country. While some critics called her ten illustrations striking and quaint, others found one particular image of a young blonde girl with her lips parted and her blouse falling off her shoulders as highly seductive and inappropriate for a children’s book. Children, however, seemed to interpret Reed’s illustrations quite innocently. One mother told The Bookman in December 1896 that her daughter was so fascinated by the images that she wanted to be told a story about each one.

In 1895 Reed was briefly engaged to the painter Philip Hale (1865–1931), but their relationship did not last. In the autumn of 1896 she settled in London, where she maintained a tempestuous relationship with poet Richard Le Gallienne. They continued to see each other even after Le Gallienne had married in 1897. Meanwhile, Ethel had become a contributor to a British journal of the arts titled The Yellow Book, and in early 1897 served as its editor before it ceased publication. Also in 1897, Reed went to Ireland, her mother’s birthplace, to recuperate from an unspecified illness. Several years later she and her mother returned to London where Reed continued to work. At some point around 1900, she had an affair that resulted in the birth of a son, whom she named Antony; the father was probably Le Gallienne, although Ethel did not provide the father’s name on her son’s birth certificate, nor does it appear on the 1901 British census.

Recent research by historian William S. Peterson has uncovered some of the mystery of her final years. After an affair with another married man, she gave birth to a daughter named Alexandra. In 1903 she married a British military officer named Arthur Sale Whiteley (later known as Arthur Warwick), but the marriage was troubled from the start and ended in divorce. She began drinking heavily, and seems to have returned to poor health: there is some evidence that she was losing her eyesight, and Le Gallienne was so upset upon hearing this news that he wrote a poem, ‘To One Who Is Blind’, which appeared in his 1910 collection New Poems. Reed’s final days were spent drinking and taking sleeping medications to combat the insomnia from which she had suffered for more than a decade; when she died in early March 1912, the death certificate noted that use of sleeping medications and ‘chronic alcoholism’ had contributed to her demise. The once in-demand poster artist died in relative obscurity. Le Gallienne mentions in his 1926 book The Romantic 90s that Ethel Reed had died much too young: she was only 13 days short of her 38th birthday.

Bibliography

J. M.: ‘A Chat with Miss Ethel Reed’, The Bookman, vol.2(4) (Dec 1895), pp. 277–82

H. T. P.: ‘The New Child and its Picture Books’, The Bookman, vol.4(4) (Dec 1896), pp. 301–9

S. C. de Soissons: ‘Ethel Reed and her Art’, The Poster (Nov 1898), pp. 199–202

G. Smerdon and R. Whittington-Egan: The Quest of the Golden Boy: Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne (Barre, 1962)

V. Margolin: American Poster Renaissance: The Great Age of Poster Design, 1890–1900 (New York, 1975)

E. Mazur Thomson: ‘Alms for Oblivion: The History of Women in Early American Graphic Design’, Design History: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 63–85

E. Hirschler and E. Roberts: A Studio of her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston, 2001)

W.S. Peterson: The Beautiful Poster Lady: A Life of Ethel Reed (New Castle, DE, 2013)

Kelly Holohan and Donna Halper. "Reed, Ethel." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed August 29, 2017, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2154/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2021958.