| Jane Peterson | ||
| Birth Date: November 28, 1876 |
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| Death Date: August 14, 1965 Artist Gallery |
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| Jane Peterson was born Jennie Christine Peterson in 1876 in Elgin, Illinois, to Julius and Kate Peterson. Her family was of humble background but certainly not poverty stricken. In 1895 she went to New York City to study art at the Pratt Institute on a gift of $300.00 from her mother. Before graduating she taught painting there and became one of their most popular teachers.
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.
She officially changed her name to Jane Peterson in 1909 after her first success as an artist in an exhibition in Boston. In 1925, she married Moritz Bernard Philip, a lawyer and art patron. In 1938 Peterson was named the “most outstanding individual of the year” by the American Historical Society – she was only the second woman to receive the honor.
Peterson was one of America’s most innovative artists, creating an individual style that blended traditional approaches to painting with the art of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Expressionist and Fauves. Like other American impressionists and early American modernists, Peterson was intrigued by urban and rural American life as well as the great cityscapes of Europe. Her watercolors of lively city parks, fishing villages on the New England Coast and the canals and markets of Venice have affinities to the work of renowned American artist such as John Singer Sargent and most prominently, the paintings of her friend Maurice Prendergast.
In her lifetime, she was given over 80 one-woman exhibitions and was recognized as uniquely talented painter of distinction before her death on August 14, 1965.
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