PHOTOGRAPHS
Käsebier, Gertrude
U.S. (1852 - 1934)
Portrait of Miss N
1903
Photogravure on laid Japanese tissue paper
7 3/4 x 5 3/4 in. (19.7 x 14.6 cm) image size; 11 15/16 x 8 1/4 in. (30.3 x 21 cm) mount sheet size; 11 7/8 x 8 1/4 in. (30.2 x 21 cm) sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection
FA 2006.51

Käsebier was one of a small group of women photographers prominent in the late 19th century. She began taking pictures of her family and then moved on to other portraits from which she earned a small income. Her images are admired for their nuanced, dreamlike, and timeless quality. This image is indeed a portrait, but it is fundamentally an interaction between subject and viewer. Light, or the absence of it, plays a key role in revealing the subject, as well as the surrounding context. Miss N is a woman of leisure who leans forward confidently to the viewer, holding, even offering, the pitcher in her hand.

It was not until Gertrude Käsebier had married and raised a family that she was able to study drawing and painting. While studying at the Pratt Institute in New York, she became involved with photography, and won two prizes for her photographs in 1894. This inspired her to take on photography as a career. She was a colleague of photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who called her the leading portraitist of the day. She was a member of the Photo-Secession group led by Stieglitz, a movement that approached photography as an art form akin to painting or sculpture, and which employed a deliberately unclear focus to achieve an artistic effect. -- Label copy for 150 Works of Art, October 1, 2005 to February 26, 2006.