A School Girl, Not Afraid of Drudgery, Becomes America’s Foremost Woman
Illustrator.
IN the heart of Philadelphia’s great business quarter, on lower
Chestnut street, there stands a five-story, red brick building which
is about as reserved looking as Philadelphia business structures can
be, and before which, in the street below, the tide of traffic rumbles
and clatters and clangs from early morning until night. It doesn’t look
much like a place where a person could be free enough from noise and
other distractions to exercise a fine artistic taste.
Yet it was here, I was informed, that Alice Barber Stephens had her
studio, and to this I was bound. Mrs. Stephens takes rank with A. B.
Frost, Howard Pyle, A. B. Wenzell, C. D. Gibson and others, and there
are those who put her before several of these. I remember looking over
a book of her drawings, published by some New York house, entitled
“The American Woman in the Home,” and admiring exceedingly the gentle,
refined appearance of the mothers, the excellent sedateness and
sympathetic beauty of the young married daughters, and the quiet
modesty of the girls in these pictures.
You would say, looking at these drawings, “Here is a plain,
commonplace, genuine person, who illustrates.” She has swept, sewed,
performed the duty that lay nearest. You can see it in the sketches.
She paints because she likes to, and as well as she can. She has no
thought of immortality, nor imagines that she will be hailed as a
marvel, but simply believes it is well and interesting to do good work.
Considering these things, I made my way one afternoon up several
flights of stairs,—artists must have the sky-light, you know,—to a
door labeled A. B. Stephens, which was opened by a tall, slender,
reserved-looking woman, who smiled as she admitted that she was Alice
Barber Stephens. After a sentence or two of explanation, an invitation
was extended to enter.