Elisabeth Spalding

"Little Garden Flowers" Watercolor by Elisabeth Spalding, American Still Life

In 1874, at the age of six, Elizabeth Spalding and her family settled in Denver where her father, the Reverend John F. Spalding, became an early-day bishop in the Colorado Diocese of the Episcopal Church. After graduating from Wolfe Hall, a female academy in Denver where she later taught, she went to New York in 1890 to study drawing at a private school and painting at Cooper Union with J. Alden Weir. Later in the decade, she returned to New York to study at the Art Students League with and did outdoor sketching with Leonard Ochtman. She also spent summers working with a number of eminent American artists: Arthur Wesley Dow at Ipswich, Massachusetts; John F. Carlson at Woodstock, New York; Charles H. Woodbury at Ogunquit, Maine; and Henry McCarter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts classes in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. She also studied in France and England and lived briefly in Washington, DC. Spending the major portion of her career In Denver, she became a founding member of several local important art organizations. The first was the Le Brun Art Club, the city’s initial all-female artist group formed in 1890 and named after the renowned eighteenth-century French artist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. In 1893, Spalding and several other Le Brun Club members (Henrietta Bromwell, Emma Richardson Cherry and Harriet Hayden) joined with six of their male and female colleagues to form the Artists Club of Denver that in 1923 became the Denver Art Museum. Over the years she showed in many of the annual exhibitions of both organizations and served on their hanging committees. In recognition of her talent as a water media artist, in 1919 she was elected a membership to the New York Water Color Club, awarded to only a small number of women artists from the West at that time. During World War I she donated twenty-five of her watercolors for sale at the Red Cross Shop in downtown Denver with the proceeds donated to the American Red Cross for the war effort. In 1928 she became one of the fifty-two founding members of the Denver Artists Guild, an organization encompassing most of the city’s professional artists. She participated in many of its annual exhibitions at Chappell House, the first home of the Denver Art Museum. Most of her subjects treated the Colorado landscape and still lifes with flowers indigenous to the state. Her landscapes in both oil and watercolor, done either on location or in her studio based on personal observation, were done in a post-impressionist style. Underscoring the sweep and strength of Colorado’s mountains and valleys, she painted them at various times of the day conveying their atmosphere and changing light.