NORFOLK, VIRGINIA.- The Chrysler Museum of Art presents "Gentle Modernist: The Art of Susan Watkins," on view through Spring 2003. In 1946 Norfolk banker Goldsborough Serpell bequeathed to the Museum an extraordinary gift of paintings, oil studies, academic drawings and sketches by his wife, the artist Susan Watkins (1875-1913). Among the most important gifts made to the Museum prior to Walter P. Chrysler’s arrival in 1971, the Serpell bequest comprises 62 works of art by Watkins, as well as photographs, scrapbooks, and other memorabilia documenting her career. The donation constitutes a veritable life’s work, a rich artistic archive through which the Chrysler can tell the fascinating story of Watkins’ career. Her work took her from her native California to the Art Students League in New York City and then in 1896 to Paris, where, during the next 14 years, she established herself as an award-winning painter. Returning to New York in 1910, she was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design, confirming her reputation as an American artist on the rise. Her health, however, had already begun to fail her, and in 1913, only a year after her marriage to Serpell and a move to Norfolk, Watkins died. She was 37 years old.



Drawn exclusively from the Museum’s collection, Gentle Modernist traces Watkins’ career from her student days in Paris to her triumphant return to America. In so doing, it sheds new light on the fundamental changes sweeping the art establishment in the decades around 1900, when gifted women artists like Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Watkins herself could at last fulfill their promise and, in a discipline long dominated by men, forge distinguished careers as professional painters.