I particularly wish to express my great appreciation to my Doctoral Committee and thank them for being exemplars for scholarly research. They are Professor Susan J. Rosowski, Professor Paul A. Olson, and Professor Stephen C. Behrendt, from the Department of English, and Professor Emeritus Peter J. Worth, from the Art and Art History Department, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They have been truly supportive friends.

I am also indebted to many individuals and to the Staff at many Institutions. My work was aided by grants from the University of Nebraska and I greatly thank them and I am indebted to those who supported me, in receiving the 1990 Maude Hammond Fling Travel Fellowship; the Summer Regents' Award in 1988; the Maude Hammond Fling Fellowship, 1989-90; the Franklin E. and O. M. Johnson Fellowship, 1988-89; the Summer Regent's Award, 1990; the Hazel V. Embley Fellowship and UNL Regent's Award, 1990-91, and the M. A. Massengale Presidential Fellowship, 1991-92. These funds made it possible for me to examine first hand the Cather-related materials in museums and libraries at home and abroad. For these honors I am indeed grateful to Dean Yost, Associate Dean Merlin Lawson, the University Committee for Grants and Fellowships, and to M. Ralston dePutron, former Assistant to the Dean of Graduate Fellowships, and especially to my Doctoral Supervisor, Susan J. Rosowski.

I extend my special thanks to Doctor Robert Haller, who directed my Master's Program; to Professor Fran Kaye; to Professor and Dean Ken Hendrickson at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Love Library for a carrel and to those in the Circulation Department, to those in the excellent Department of Inter-Library Loan, and to Joseph Svoboda, Chief Archivist, and to Lynn Beideck-Porn, the Slote Collection, Archives, for study space; to the Staff at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery; to the Staff at the Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln; to Sue Fintel and John Lindell at the Willa Cather Historical Center, Red Cloud; to Patricia K. Phillips, Director, and Staff at the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, Red Cloud; and to Jane Renner Hood and the Nebraska Humanities Council [in regard to the Speaker's Bureau]. In addition, I am grateful to the following individuals and Institutions:

To Jean Schwind for her idea of a Catalogue Raisonné for pictorial art in Willa Cather's work; Joan Crane and Michael Plunkett, Curators of Manuscripts, University Archivist, Alderman Library, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville VA, for excellent Cather material; Jeff Marshall, Curator of MSS, Guy Bailey Memorial Library, University of Vermont, for his kind attention by telephone; and Professor Vivien Hixon, UMI; William M. Curtin for his early Cather work in The World & Parish.

Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Yalta Menuhin Ryce, and Eya Fechin, for personal remembrances of Willa Cather; Helen Cather Southwick and the late Philip L. Southwick for allowing a viewing of Nicolai Fechin's Willa Cather, and use of Cather photograph at the Luxembourg Gardens; Jeanne Shaffer, founder of the Cather Circle in Pittsburgh, for photographs of the Carnegie Cases and untold encouragement; Kathleen Byrne for many notes concerning Cather's Pittsburgh years; Betty Mertz for her great kindness shown on my visit to Pittsburgh.

John Kirkpatrick, HRHRC Curator, and Cathy Henderson, Curator of MMS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas-Austin, for allowing me to read the Cather material in the Alfred A. Knopf collection; Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., for permission to use Alfred A. Knopf's personal papers in the Harry Ranson Library.

Graham W. J. Beal, Director and the Educational Staff at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha NE, for information on the El Greco and the Gér�me; the Staff at the Omaha Public Library for providing data regarding Bakst's portrait of Willa Cather.

Stephanie Turnham, Registrar, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fé NM, concerning Blumenschein's paintings; the Staff at the Gerald Peters Gallery for Frank Applegate's chronology.

Staff at the Kenneth and Helen Spencer Art Reference Library of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City MO, for their helpful assistance at the library; Staff at the Art & Architecture Library, Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas University, Lawrence KS.

Gloria Groom, Assistant to the Curator, European Painting, The Art Institute of Chicago for viewing Monet's Red Poppies in storage; to Jack Brown, Director, and the Staff Ryerson and Burnham Library, Art Institute of Chicago; the Staff at the Newberry Library, Chicago IL for allowing me to inspect The Willa Cather Papers, Modern Manuscripts Department; Chicago Historical Society, Archives and Manuscripts Department for sending data regarding the Lorado Taft fountain.

The Carnegie Institute: Phillip Johnston, Director, and the Staff at The Carnegie Museum of Art for providing two day's use of the Art Library; Maria Zini and Staff in the Western Pennsylvania Room for Cather reference materials; Staff in the Museum of Natural History; Cheryl O'Neill, Fine Arts Librarian, Music and Art Department, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh PA for providing acquisition dates for several art books.

The Staff at the Reference Room, William Morris Hunt Memorial Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA, for research on the Boston artists and the Barbizons; Mr. Vose and Staff at the Robert Vose Gallery for answering queries about Benson; the Isabella Gardner Museum; the Staff at the Boston Public Library for supplying slides and information on the Puvis de Chavannes murals; and Leslie Morris, Curator, and

Susan Halpert, Reference Librarian, and Staff of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, for allowing me to read letters in the Willa Cather correspondence in the Houghton-Mifflin papers.

William B. Walker, Chief Librarian, Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, for information concerning research in the Art Library; Jane Weaver, The Frick Library, The Frick Collection, NYC, for guidance in locating paintings; Jerry Mallick, Photo-Division, Archives, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.; Barbara J. Dawson, Archivist, The Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC.

David Fraser Jenkins, British Collection, Tate Gallery, London, England, for arranging my visit to see the holding in Tate Storage; Miranda Belina and Staff at the National Gallery, London, England; The British Library; especially Paul Dove, British Museum Photographs, in Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, England, for providing Hogarth, D�rer, and Burne-Jones prints and photographs; Department of Prints and Drawings and Paintings, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Joanna Banham, Curator, Leighton House for the Director of Libraries and Arts, Kensington-London, England, for providing inventory lists for the Leighton House; the Staff at the Ashmoleon Museum for Burne-Jones material in Oxford, England; Stephen Wildman, Deputy Keeper (Prints and Drawings), Department of Fine Art, Birmingham Art Gallery, Birmingham, England, for information about their Burne-Jones holdings.

Genevi�ve Lacambre, Conservateur en Chef au Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France for specifics concerning the Thomy Thi�ry Collection at the Luxembourg in 1902; Mrs. Kartouky, Service Photographique, at the Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, France; the staff at the Pantheon for allowing me to view the Puvis de Chavannes mural during their period of refurbishment; Biblioteque Nationale, Paris.

I wish also to thank the members of my 1986 Cather Seminar and the Cather Colloquium for their shared interest in Willa Cather; to those in the English and Art and Art History Departments; and to Norman Geske, the Director Emeritus of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, for his expertise in answering obscure questions.

Finally my thanks go to my reader and husband, Paul, to Anne Sweet, and to my extended family and friends who have encouraged me throughout my doctoral pursuit.

Our memories are like the colors in paints, but you must arrange them, and it is a hard job to do a portrait in ink without getting too much description. (Willa Cather. Nebraska State Journal 25 Apr. 1925: 11).

Art was a religion for Willa Cather and its Artist was God. Cather envisioned this God, "this Painter, this Poet, this Musician, this gigantic Artist of all art that is," as One who judges all mortals by the beauty of their art (KA 178). In 1894 with this fundamental belief well embedded, Cather painted one of her first Nebraska pictures in prose that reminds us of an early Karl Bodmer landscape. High on a Nebraska bluff an "old Indian Chief" sits upright in his grave and gazes from the point that overlooks the Missouri River:

Watching those glorious river sunrises as the light changes the little clouds into ridges of burning opals, and through the rifts of the great cloud behind which the sun hides, the light sifts down in a golden shower upon the hills of Missouri until at last the veil of mist and cloud is eaten through and through with the inner glory and is utterly consumed in light, and the sun rises in his fullness, throwing a band of light across the river like a thread of gold drawn through riffles of clouded silver. (1894 W & P 111)

In 1973, writer Eudora Welty noticing another prose picture written by Cather in My �ntonia, stated, "What she has given us is of course not the landscape as you and I would see it, but her vision of it; we are looking at a work of art. There is something very special, too, about its composition. Look at the Nebraska of her novels as a landscape she might have addressed herself to as an artist with a pencil or a brush" (AWC 4).

My own objective in this study is to discover and catalogue the specific artists who influenced such painterly prose by Willa Cather.

In 1874, a year after Cather's birth, the French Impressionist artists including Claude Monet first exhibited their radical style of painting in Paris. Twenty years later as a newpaper reporter in Lincoln, Nebraska, Cather reviewed the art lectures given by Lorado Taft, a lecturer from the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Crete, Nebraska, Chautauqua. The Crete program states that Taft showed three-hundred stereopticon views including modern French paintings shown the "Art Palace" at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. Taft who was a widely known sculptor and art critic previously had written six articles for the Baltimore Sun, entitled "Art at the Fair" (Revisiting 400). The Chicago World's Fair exhibits generally ignored the French Impressionists, yet two Chicago collectors lent several paintings by Monet and Camille Pissarro, and several emerging American Impressionist, such as J. A. Weir, J. H. Twachtman, and Frank W. Benson were included in the show ("Half a Century" 9; Revisiting 200-passim).

The young student Cather saw first hand a few American Impressionist paintings that were lent by the Art Insitute to the University of Nebraska's for the Haydon Art Club Exhibit in 1895. For the Lincoln newspaper she reviewed, among others, Port Ben, Delaware and Hudson Canal, a painting by Theodore Robinson, previously shown at the Chicago Exposition. Robinson trained both at the Art Institue of Chicago and with Claude Monet at his home in Giverny, France, in the early 1890's ("Half a Century" 10). When Cather moved to Pittsburgh after graduation from the university, she immediately encountered paintings by international artists at the newly opened Carnegie Art Gallery. In the first two years alone she would have viewed two paintings, Brittany Washerwoman and Le Chemin du Pardon, by Jules Bréton, Red Poppies and Ice Floes at Vethouil by Claude Monet, Torrero Saluant by Edouard Manet, Hilaire Degas' Race Horses, and Psyche's Wedding by England's Edward Burne-Jones, among the many by various artist (Carnegie Catalogues: 1896 and 1897). This series of events show a natural link to the Impressionist-style paintings that Willa Cather saw in her formative years. Quite naturally, the French Impressionists, especially Manet and Monet were to become her favorite painters.

Going back to Cather's childhood we find that she saw a plethora of pictures, but only a few were reproductions of fine art. Yet the Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska holds her charming scrapbook that she made as a young girl that proves her latent love of pictorial images. Included in that big book are colorful German-dyed cards that she collected from Sunday School and advertising from the local stores. Later, in her writings Cather recalled the family portraits back in Virginia and the woodblock prints from her old school books. A specific picture that Cather later mentioned was an exotic one found in her aunt's book, Lalla Rookh [Crane D326]. Stories and pictures of Byronic adventures were beloved by the entire Cather brood. Magazines like Century, Scribner's, and Harper's illustrated with engravings and color-lithographs were available to the children. In "Old Mrs. Harris," Cather wrote that the framed oil-chromos and engravings like those in Mrs. Rosen's [Weiner] home were the nearest thing to an art gallery that a small town had.

The active period of Cather's pictorial experience began in Lincoln. Parents of her University of Nebraska friends provided an entirely new milieu for Cather in the world of fine art. The Pounds, the Canfields, and the Gere family were knowledgeable patrons actively promoting the arts in the growing Nebraska Capitol. For the first time Cather met young people who studied Art, and the University Library held a number of art books that reproduced paintings from Botticelli to Burne-Jones, from Piranesi to Puvis de Chavannes. While she worked for her degree Cather read John Ruskin religiously and became increasingly interested in the fine arts during her university years.

By 1892 Cather was writing for the student newspaper, The Hesperian. In a Fall issue Cather published a play whose character, Miss Kelley, diligently learned the name and dates of every painter that she encountered. Miss Kelley probably described Cather herself during this period of enormous activity in the Haydon Art club that included her friends.

In November of that year Cather became the literary editor for The Hesperian, the only woman listed on the staff. Professor Herbert Bates may have encouraged her to illustrate several of her own short stories, like "Peter," and "The Tale of the White Pyramid," in the manner that W. S. Thackeray had done in Vanity Fair which she had read (KA 58 [Crane C1 and C3]). Similar drawings appeared in some of her stories after she left Lincoln (see Cather-as-artist in the Catalogue). The Hesperian drawings resembled the linear art-nouveau style like those illustrated by Elihu Vedder, in the Rub�iy�t of Omar Kh�yy�m. The book was in the Cather family collection, and she greatly admired Vedder as an artist (KA 385). Her friend Louise Pound also owned a similar, inscribed copy of the Rub�iy�t, emphasizing the fact that the edition was popular; it is now in the Slote Collection, UNL. Much later, Cather admitted to her publisher that she had tried [again?] to draw her own illustrations for My �ntonia (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mr. Greenslet. 18 Oct. 1917. Houghton Library, Harvard University).

By Spring, on February 20, 1894, Cather was becoming so knowledgeable about art that she was scheduled to lecture on "Houses and Homes of England and Germany" to the Haydon Art Club, in the Chapel of the State University. Her publishing mentor and friend, Will O. Jones, was also on the program speaking on "Japanese and Chinese Architecture, and Interior Decorations." Unfortunately, she became too ill to speak (Haydon Program).

That same summer Lorado Taft, a popular university lecturer from Chicago, came to the Crete Chautauqua. Cather covered the Chautauqua in nine articles for the Lincoln Evening News [Crane D66 to D74]. Taft presented three lectures with stereoptican-slides showing works of art and great artists. The thirteenth annual session of the Nebraska Chautauqua Assembly was a traveling extravaganza comprised of entertainers, preachers, and educators and a yearly highlight for small-town citizens. As a journalism student Cather reported on all of the Chautauqua activities. On the program with Lorado Taft was a scholar and minister from Omaha, the Rev. Joseph Duryea, D.D. Dr. Duryea gave eight lectures on the "Roman Republic to the Reformation," a subject that mildly interested Cather. She noted that "[t]he heat did not prevent the usual large audience from listening intently to a lecturer who knows how to make a relatively dry subject interesting" [Crane D73].

In one of the articles Cather named Lorado Taft "a modern of moderns in taste and creed. Work and enthusiasm like Mr. Taft's make the artistic future of the West seem possible and almost make me dream that it is near at hand, even at the door" [Crane D66]. Taft referred to fading the French Academicians like Bouguereau, Meissonier, and Gér�me, and introduced his audience to the popular Barbizon painters—Corot, Millet, and possibly Puvis de Chavannes. After the 1894 Chautauqua, Cather reflected:

I sat in a very plebeian neighborhood last night. The people about me were mostly country folk, people with the marks of toil and the hardest kind of living upon them. They were people to whom all the great books and pictures and music of the world are sealed mysteries, to whom all higher delights do not exist. [Crane D70]

These words predict the theme of her story, "The Wagner Matinee." The story concerns a displaced artist who returns from the Midwest to a Boston concert, only to realize her artistic deprivation [Crane C32].

Later that fall, Lorado Taft copublished "Impressions on Impressionism." In the pamphlet "The Critical Triumvirate," three writers—Lorado Taft, Hamlin Garland, and painter Charles Francis Browne—discussed the French plein-air painters as the Impressionists were called then. Several French Impressionists, including Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, had shown pictures in the International Hall at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. Lorado Taft had also lectured at this Exposition that first brought European art to many Midwesterners (Gerdts 144-49).

In September 1894, Cather got in trouble while newswriting about Art at the Nebraska State Fair, in her regular column, "Utterly Irrelevant." She irreverently criticized homespsun art, "the kind of fancy work on canvas, with which dear old ladies are wont to console their loneliness, when they had far better employ themselves with poodle dogs and parrots" [Crane D80]. Those words cost her the column's title. The column "Utterly Irrelevant" was changed to a new headline, "As You Like It," within two months time. By December she rallied, saying that "[w]ord artists have had their day in greatness and are rapidly on the decline. We want men who can paint with emotion, not with words. We haven't time for pastels in prose and still life; we want pictures of human men and women" (Nebraska State Journal 23 Dec. 1894: 13).

In January 1895, Cather again reviewed paintings by local artists, only this time her comments were favorable. Flavia Canfield and Mrs. Charles Gere both dabbled in paint and exhibited artwork in the Citizen's Loan Collection of the Haydon Art Club (Haydon Catalogues). Cather reviewed four of twenty six entries by Flavia Canfield listed in the Haydon Art Club's Midwinter Exhibit 1894-95 ([Crane C126]; Haydon catalogue, p. 13; see "Flavia and Her Artists," 1905 [Crane C34]). Other more famous works were lent to the Lincoln exhibit by the Central Art Association of America. Cather especially appreciated paintings shown previously at the Chicago World's Fair by Boston Impressionist Frank Benson—Firelight, and Theodore Robinson—Port Ben: Scene on the Delaware and Hudson Canal. The latter now held by the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln. Cather was then a regular contributor to the Nebraska State Journal, and her Haydon Art Club review appeared on January 6, 1985 ([Crane D126]). She probably wrote the two other reviews on the same page; one by Jane Archer refers to Lorado Taft's pamphlet, "Impressions on Impressionism," only months after its publication (see KA 186 for a different opinion by Slote [Crane D126]).

In March 1895, Cather and a friend, librarian Mary Jones, traveled to Chicago to attend the Opera (KA 20). It is not recorded that Cather visited the Art Institute of Chicago that year, but it is likely that she did so. It was to become her favorite Art Gallery ("The Chicago Art Institute" W & P 842). In a conversation with Willa Cather's niece, Helen Cather Southwick, she stated that "her aunt was surely dying to get there." Cather's biographer James Woodress agreed that "Willa Cather probably visited the Art Institute in the spring of 1895 when she went to Chicago to the opera" (Woodress, James. Personal interview with the author. 15 March 1991, Lincoln NE). In 1896 Cather reported seeing the Art Institute's Doré Collection, while stopping Chicago on her way to her new position in Pittsburgh (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mariel." June/July 1896. Slote Collection, Box 4, UNL). References to the Art Institute of Chicago appear in three of Cather's novels, The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Lucy Gayheart, and the museum held a special place in her heart.

In one of her earliest stories, Cather exposed the devalued art on the prairie when Canute Canuteson broods over the rude carvings on "the wide window sills" of his shanty ("On the Divide" 494-504). His was a primeval yearning for the pictorial image. As she left Nebraska for good, Cather was to see many examples of Fine Art during the next ten-year period she spent visiting the Carnegie Art Galleries in the Carnegie Institute, in Pittsburgh. The Carnegie Art Museum, as it is now known, initiated its International Exhibitions the same year that Cather arrived in Pittsburgh to work for The Home Monthly magazine. The 1896 Carnegie International Exhibition was America's first major showing of international artist's work and a spearhead for Modern Art. Fine Art came to Pittsburgh through the efforts of the industrial "Goliaths," men like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. In a witty response to these formidable men, Cather signed an article, "Goliath," one amidst the Philistine throng, in her review "A Philistine in the Gallery" (Library (21 April 1900): 8-9). Yet she sometimes sided with the Philistine:

Cather: "The real fault of popular taste, when we get down to the heart of the matter, is that the people prefer the pretty to the true. That is a fault, certainly; but not so grave a one as the Young Art Student makes it. Indeed, there are times when I would take the Philistine's word for a picture, long before I would the Young Art Student's; for the Philistine is always governed by moderation, and he is always honest with himself" (W & P 844).

At the Carnegie Art Museum Cather saw works by American artists like James McNeill Whistler, Edwin A. Abbey, C. S. Reinhart, John White Alexander, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, and H. O. Tanner, an African-American painter of religious subjects. Favorite artists whom she often named and who exhibited at the Carnegie were Puvis de Chavannes, Frank Benson, Gari Melchers, William Merritt Chase, and Josef Isra�ls. French Impressionists who had paintings there included Eduoard Manet, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas and his good friend, Pittsburgh native Mary Cassatt. Cather completely ignored Mary Cassatt in her all of her reviews.

Distinguished artists like Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, and Puvis de Chavannes often served on Carnegie Juries and Exhibition Committees. Occasionally Cather had an opportunity to meet some of them when she reported on special events.

At one such event Will H. Low and Willa Cather were dinner partners prior to the opening of the Second Annual Carnegie Art Exhibition, in November 1897.

Will H. Low was a New York painter who had studied abroad and was an extremely knowledgeable art historian who wrote for McClure's Magazine. Low had just finished writing a fine series, especially commissioned by Mr. S. S. McClure, for McClure's, entitled "A Century of Painting." To prepare for the series, S. S. McClure had sent Will H. Low to Europe to view paintings in their original state. For the first time McClure described a new photographic techniques, not engravings or facsimilies as before, used to reproduced the masterpieces for these articles. McClure advertised the series as being "perhaps more profusely illustrated than any articles yet offered by any magazine to its readers" (5 (June to Nov. 1895): 576). In the articles Will H. Low discussed the great works, decade by decade. Cather described her important meeting with him in her column "The Passing Show" (Courier 30 Oct. 1895: 3 [Crane D341]).

Cather was becoming an unabashed Francophile because of her love of French authors and French painters. While at Nebraska State University she had studied French as a language, and read Paul Verlaine, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Pierre Loti, Alexandre Dumas, George DuMaurier, and George Sand. In Pittsburgh together with her friends, George and Helen Seibel, Cather read works by Anatole France, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Left-Bank bohemians. During this period Cather was writing poetry, and Verlaine, the French Symbolist poet, was a favorite of hers (KA 394 n. #71). In fact, another Pittsburgh friend, Ethelbert Nevin, composed a song for Cather using lyrics from Verlaine's poem, "La Lune Blanche" (Byrne 32).

The symbolist poets created vague moods by transposing musical analogies or colorful images into their compositions (Lehmann 167, 187, 220, 257). The music of Richard Wagner, the poems of Edgar Allen Poe, and Thomas Carlyle's chapter on "The Symbol," in Sartor Resartus, greatly influenced the the poets. In their works they often, like the painter James McNeill Whistler, used musical terms like sonata and nocturne. They inserted color-patched words like roses, or rubies, causing mental images to expand the mood in a poem. Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, and others termed the transpositions of sensually-loaded substitutions as "Correspondances" [sic] (Correspondance. 5 vols. Paris). This kind of parallelism in imagery is also known as synesthesia [sic] (Lehmann 213).

Cather, at age twenty three, wrote the following lines while describing Verlaine's Symbolist poetry. At the same time that she inserted her own Symboliste "Correspondances." As she substituted art-freighted words for less descriptive ones, she proved she understood the process very well.

Verlaine's verse is definite only through its vagueness. Fact and incidents count for nothing, it is all mood. He does not write of a night or a woman or a passion, but of a sensation. His care is not so much the theme as for his words, every poem of his is a set with gleaming jewels like a tiara of an eastern princess from which all the colors of the changeful skies shimmer; warm lights of morning, high lights of noon, sad lights of evening, cold lights of windy days. They are more like jewels than anything else, emeralds that are green as stormy seas, rubies that are red as heart's blood, diamonds that glitter like the starlight and like them they are cold, beautiful and strangely unhuman. His verses are like music, they are made up of harmony and feeling, they are as indefinite and barren of facts as a nocturne. They tell only of a mood. . . . He created a new verbal art of communicating sensations not only by the meaning of words, but of their relation, harmony and sound.

(Nebraska State Journal 2 Feb. 1896: 9; KA 395, my italics)

In the Paris cafés Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Emile Zola were some of the symbolist/realist poets and writers who met with artists like Manet, Whistler, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, and photographer Nadar at the cafés. Although Puvis de Chavannes was an independent painter, he was thought of as a symbolist by some his contemporaries. Since these artists were so closely associated, it seems inappropriate to group them here into isolated movements, i.e., Realist, Impressionist, Naturalist, or Symboliste. Regardless of their movement's "isms" or "ists," as labeled by critics, the artists all shared new ideas; and the seeds of their shared techniques found fertile ground in young imagination of Willa Cather.

Also in the Pittsburgh years Cather changed her mind after seeing the original work of James McNeill Whistler; she withdrew her early judgment learned from John Ruskin's bookish rhetoric. In 1896, the Carnegie Art Museum acquired Whistler's moody painting of a Spanish violinist entitled, Arrangement in Black: Pablo de Sarasate. To this day the Sarasate continues to draw either love or hate reactions at the Carnegie. Evidently, Cather grew to admire the controversial Whistler painting, as well as his other Nocturnes, Harmonies, Symphonies, and Variations that he exhibited at several Carnegie Internationals.

Whistler, born an American, influenced both French painters on the European Continent, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters in England. When Whistler met with Manet in Paris in 1893, the American-French-English flow of new ideas in Modern Art completed the circle. Whistler's Symphony No. 1: The White Girl had turned the direction of painting (1862 National Gallery, D.C.). The erotic beauty and sexual directness of The White Girl impressed both French Symbolists and English Pre-Raphaelites (Pre-Raphaelite Papers 141). Early on Cather admired the work of these artists, as did critic Arthur Symons as shown in his essay, "The Decadent Movement in Literature." Symons viewed the emerging Modern Art as a movement without the specific distinctions and catagories of today. Both he, and Cather, preferred the fluidity between the so-called "Sister Arts," i.e. painting, poetry, architecture, sculpture, music, as employed by the early Symbolists.

In Pittsburgh Cather acted as editor for such publications as, The Home Monthly, The Library, and the Index to Pittsburgh Life, where she continued to write articles about art although not always under her real name (Articles in bib.*). The various features and stories for each issue of the magazines required a number of illustrations or photographs, and Cather selected some of the artists and much of the art work. Perhaps she even used some of her own sketches for these magazines, and for her short stories in very early publications. These diverse images made their many impressions on Cather and she would absorb thousands more in the years to come. At times she referred to her writing itself as having a "picture-making" quality.

Sometime in 1899, Willa Cather met Frances Isabelle McClung, an elegant and privileged daughter of a Pittsburgh judge. They both enjoyed the theater and the arts, and Isabelle McClung sometimes joined Willa Cather at the Seibels' house (Byrne 24) where the young women studied foreign languages together (Southwick, Helen Cather. "Willa Cather's Early Career." Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 65.2 (Apr. 1982): 85-98). It wasn't long until the McClung family invited Cather to live at their formidable new home on elegant Murrayhill Avenue. But before moving from a number of boarding houses to the McClung residence, Cather spent several months in Washington, DC., in 1898. There, she renewed old ties as she lived with her Virginia cousins, the James Howard Gore family. During that period she reviewed two art exhibits at the Corcoran Gallery (Articles*). Cather returned to Pittsburgh to teach Latin, Composition, and Algebra at Central High School. Isabelle and she planned a Grand Tour of Europe that soon fell into place.

In 1902, Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung sailed to Europe, landed at Liverpool, England. They met Dorothy Canfield, a former Lincoln, Nebraska friend then in London. Immediately, Cather was surrounded by Old World architecture and fine art in that magnificent city. She glimpsed the Old Masters in the National Gallery of Art, and perhaps went to the Tate, or the Courtauld Collection. In Kensington, she trudged through the studios of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Watts, and Lord Leighton. His extraordinary house-studio remains open to the public today, and a visit there brings back the era most vividly.

At the British Museum near Bedford Square, Cather, like her character, could "linger about the place for a while and . . . ponder by Lord Elgin's marbles upon the lastingness of things, or, in the mummy room, upon the awful brevity of others" (AB 33). Yet her American prudishness caused her to compare London's street women to The Harlot's Progress, a pejorative series of prints by Hogarth.

Cather had previously admired English architecture in Chester, England, one of the first stops on their tour. Upon arriving in London, she saw the Houses of Parliament, West Minster Cathedral, St. Paul's, and undoubtedly a number of other Wren Churches as well. In Rouen, France, she encountered the enormous Gothic Cathedral, and nearby, St. Ouen's Church, both found later in One of Ours.

The young women arrived in Paris—then undisputed Mecca for the Arts. In Paris, there were the Cathedrals of Notre Dame, Sacré Coeur, and San Suplice, the Cluny Museum, the Louvre, the Luxembourg Museum, and a world of other architectural wonders. The haunting strains of accordian music floated up from the Metropolitan subways.

They stayed on the Left Bank across the street from the medieval Cluny Museum, famous for its Lady and the Unicorn, and its ruined Roman baths. Their quarters, on 11 rue de Cluny in a "charming apartment," were presumably the same rooms occupied earlier by Flavia Canfield, her daughter Dorothy, and Mariel Gere, all friends from Lincoln. From there one could "look down on the right upon the ivy covered Museé and on the left the Sorbonne" ([J]. "Letter to Mrs. Gere." 16 Jan. 1900. Slote Collection, Archives, University of Nebraska).

Traveling south of Paris to the Fontainbleau Forest, Cather became homesick when she saw the actual scenes that inspired the Barbizon artists—Corot, Millet, Bréton, and Bastien Lepage—that so resembled Nebraska (see Rosowski 53). Her revealing news articles concerning the entire trip are collected in Willa Cather in Europe.

After returning to America Cather used the artistic material from Europe in some of her short stories, some of it in a symbolic and suggestive manner. Professor Bernice Slote has written that "Willa Cather liked symbols, magic, suggestion, and myth. There is enough evidence to suggest that she did try some complex and subtle designs in her fiction, usually giving clues in names, places, details, quotations. No allusions were irrelevant" (KA 93). The following are a few of my examples of Cather's use of her memories from Paris.

"The Profile" is Cather's short story set in Paris that caused a real-life rift between her and the Canfield family. Dorothy Canfield-Fisher, who was with McClung and Cather in Paris. She as outraged at Cather's vivid portrayal of the disfigured wife of the French portraitist. Cather's bitter characterization resembles a Canfield-Fisher friend in Paris.

In another story about an sculptor, entitled "The Namesake," Cather's opening lines, and Ernest Blumenschein's illustration for the piece, echoed Fantin-Latour's pictorial Homage to Manet, a painting that she saw in Paris. Manet and his studio-mates inspired Fantin-Latour's A Studio in Batignolles Quarter (1870). That particular painting was copied by Blumenschein, with only the heads different, to illustrate Cather's story.

In addition, Cather's visit to the Burne-Jones' studio in Kensington developed into her short story, "The Marriage of Phaedra." In yet another story, "Flavia and Her Artists," Cather's characters recalled Flavia Canfield and her artistic friends. And in "A Gold Slipper," Cather wrote of Léon Bakst's influence on avant-garde dresses worn by American women. Bakst won fame for the costumes and sets that he designed for the Ballet Russes, and later on, painted a portrait of Cather in his Paris studio in 1923 (illustrated in Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir 64).

After leaving Pittsburgh for work in New York City, Cather moved to Greenwich Village, where she lived near painters like Don Hedger, in her story "Come, Eden Bower." While living in Boston in her apartment on Chestnut Street, Cather could walk to the grand home of Mrs. Annie (James T.) Fields. Perhaps she visited there on Charles Street, overlooking the river, with Mrs. Field's friends, Miss Jewett and Isabella Gardner, the famous collector. The young woman joined intellectual discussions about and painters like Eduoard Manet, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and other artists and literati. Surely she gazed at the Puvis de Chavannes murals while doing research in the Boston Library, and visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to admire its many Millets.

In 1908, Cather and Isabelle McClung extended their Grand Tour of Europe to Italy. Unfortunaly, there are no news articles to describe this trip. But we do know from letters and cards that they visited several favorite haunts as had their old Boston friends, Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Such places included the Cava de la Trinit�, a Benedictine Monastery outside Rome, and the Hotel & Pension Palumbo, at Ravello. Indeed, at Ravello, Cather likened the water in the Gulf of Salerno to the legendary blue sea that Puvis de Chavannes had painted. She was probably thinking of Puvis' sea in The Vision of Antiquity, held at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh (Cather. "Letter to Miss Jewett." 10 May 1908. bMS AM1743.1, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

Cather's description of the sea later surfaced in her fiction: "The sea before us was so rich and heavy and opaque that it might have been lapis lazuli. It was the blue of legend, simply; the color that satisfies the soul like sleep" (WCCSF 85). From Naples, she wrote that she admired a Roman Republican head like those in her Latin books, and without a definite record to confirm, one can only imagine that in Rome the women visited Augustus in the Ara Pacis, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini in the Vatican, the Forum, the Farnesina, and surely St. Peter's Basilica. Perhaps Cather saw it from the far hillside that she immortalized in the Prologue of Death Comes for the Archbishop.

In 1912, Cather published as her first novel, her Jamesian "studio picture," Alexander's Bridge (AB x). She admired author Henry James and by this time had probably read his essay concerning Edwin Abbey and Charles S. Reinhart, "Our Artists in Europe." Here, James compared the work of painters and writers alike, stating that "style for one art is style for another, so blessed is the fraternity that binds them together, and the worker in words may take a lesson from the picture-maker" (James 48). Cather's readers find that her character, Barley Alexander, actually lived and worked in a mirrored studio apartment that belonged to a portrait painter gone abroad.

At the 1990 Fourth National Cather Seminar, in Santa Fe, English author Hermoine Lee, showed slides of Edwardian arts and artists that Cather undoubtedly saw on her early trips to England. Lee's visuals particularly informed Alexander's Bridge. The title of her lecture was "Cather's Bridge: Anglo-American Crossings in Willa Cather," (Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (London: Virago Press, 1989)

In her 1913 novel, O Pioneers! even Cather's accomplished country-girl, Alexandra Bergson, had only a crayon portrait of her deceased father hanging in her home. Alexandra's artistic friend, Carl Linstrum, did little water-color sketches to "delight" her. He showed her pictures made by the magic lantern and painted "slides for it on glass, [from] the Hans Andersen book" (OP 10). But when Carl Ldecided upon a career in art, it meant a move to the city.the words of Carl, as copy-engraver, probably reflected Cather's own as she left editorial work for creative, pictorial writing. As an editor at McClures Magazine, Willa Cather, like Carl, had worked with hundreds of illustrations, photographs, and graphics. He complained:

There's nothing to look forward to in my profession. Wood-engraving is the only thing I care about, and that had gone out before I began. Everything's cheap metal work nowadays, touching up miserable photographs, forcing up poor drawings, and spoiling good ones. I'm absolutely sick of it all. (OP 71-2)

Two years later Cather seemed happy again when she wrote The Song of the Lark (1915). This novel has the greatest number of references to art by the author. As Cather scholars know, The Song of the Lark takes its title from Jules Bréton's painting of the same name, which resides at the Chicago Art Institute. She specifically names Anders Zorn's as the artist of nude etchings.

. She also refers to several untitled paintings. To this author's great joy, these painting have revealed themselves on my visits to the following museums. One each is by Millet—Bringing Home the Newborn Calf—still at the Chicago Art Institute, and the other by Manet—The Street Singer—now at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In the novel Cather also refers to an Odalisque, which at least was influenced by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre's La Grande Odalisque at the Louvre, and to Léon Gér�me's The Pasha's Grief, now in the Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

In the time one spends with Cather's talented Thea Kronborg, one finds the clearest perspective of the long road that a small-town girl trods to cultural awareness when compared to her city-sisters. While viewing the paintings at Chicago's Art Institute, Thea only appreciates the picture's story, not the painting itself. Since The Song of the Lark is somewhat autobiographical, we might wrongly assume that Willa Cather, like Thea Kronborg, was an art-illiterate in the museum. Certainly, in this regard, Thea Kronborg did not mirror Willa Cather in her knowledge of famous painters and their works of art.

By the time The Song of the Lark was published, Willa Cather had seen all manner of pictorial art, bad and good. She had written several critical articles concerning specific artists and/or paintings concerning various art exhibitions in Lincoln, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC, and had access to innumerable books on Art History in the Carnegie Art Library, in Pittsburgh. She surely would have read several major series on famous paintings published in McClures Magazine, each by her friend, Will H. Low, by John LaFarge, and by John White Alexander, keeping her well informed about the arts. In the U.S and Europe, she had visited artists' studios, their locales, their art galleries, and most of the major art museums on both continents; and she had previously used famous artists, or their pictures to enrich her short stories, such as Manet's Olympe in "The Profile."

Although the story line in The Song of the Lark loosely coincides with Cather's own awakening to the visual arts, her knowledge and awareness of fine art, unlike Thea Kronborgs, grew exponentially at every stage of her professional career. Thea knows first the oil-chromo by Holman Hunt in Moonstone parlors; then she sees the Corots, Brétons, and Millets at the Art Institute of Chicago; and finally she encounters the "most beautiful Manet in the world" that hangs in Mr. Nathenmeyer's mansion which more or less ends her brush with art.

In The Song of the Lark, Thea's denial of an interest in painting emphasizes her dedication to her own art. Her determined wish to become a famous singer excludes any outside interest—not only art—that interfered with her quest for a career. And yet the visual art that she so disdained serves to illuminate the progressive steps in the development of her career. Only in this way does she resemble the artistic Cather.

But Cather makes a quantum-literary-leap, as she consciously uses pictorials in her text to expose Thea's social status, her cultural acumen, and the progression of her career. Eventually, in later writings, Cather employed art and artists to succinctly define characters, reveal cultural beliefs, set scenes, inspire story, and to establish its very framework.

Gradually Cather's artistic references became more embedded and her picture-making more syncretic. Houghton-Mifflin published Cather's next novel, My �ntonia (1918), the story of a Czech immigrant girl and her friends. Cather's friend, Elizabeth Sergeant, saw �ntonia as a "kind of great earth mother, a symbol" and wrote that the farm girls "were described in terms of character and individual experience, through interweaving themes and detailed scenes in genre painting" (150-51). In letters to her publisher, Ferris Greenslet, Cather insisted that W. T. Benda, a Czech-American familiar with the culture, illustrate the book (Schwind 51).

If we study Willa Cather's path of literary clues, we find that some of her characters' early experience with pictorial art mirror her own. For instance, Jim Burden thought that Mr. Shimerda's hair that "bushed out behind his ears, . . . made him look like the old portraits" that he remembered from Virginia (MA 24). Sapphira Colbert, in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, considered those family portraits a symbol so important that she paid for them with the seduction of her personal slave (SSG 9). Like Jim, the artistic memories of a fine Virginia house lingered on in young Cather's mind. E. K. Brown recognized Cather's use of symbolism in his article for the Yale Review:

Her fiction became a kind of symbolism, with the depths and suggestions that belong to symbolist art, and with the devotion to a music of style and structure for which the great literary symbolists strove, [Walter] Pater and [George] Moore and later Henry James. (E. K. Brown 91)

Times were changing and the Symbolists and the French Impressionists began to seem rather old-fashioned. In 1913, a radical new order in painting came into view at the New York City Armory Show. There, controversial works by Cubists, Futurists, and Expressionists, threatened to usurp Modernist Art. Some time later, in "The House on Charles Street," Cather stated that Mrs. Annie Fields told her "the Cubists weren't any queerer than Manet and the Impressionists were when they first came to Boston, and people used to run in for tea and ask her whether she had ever heard of such a thing as 'blue snow,' or a man's black hat being purple in the sun!" Cather remained unconvinced that a certain decadence was not overtaking European art.

After several trips to Europe, Cather sought a new landscape and unfettered art in the American Southwest. She and Edith Lewis absorbed the culture near the ancient villages of the Anasazi [Ancient Ones] in Mesa Verde, and the New Mexico Pueblos of their native descendents. In 1915, in Taos, they visited Ernest Blumenschein and other friends who initiated the Taos Art Colony (see Blumenschein in Catalogue). Cather knew several of them from her days at McClures. Like the blurred and distant blue mountains on New Mexico horizons, Cather's symbolism became more vaguely embedded in her fiction. No longer were her usues of Symbolistic correspondances so structurally obvious; no longer were they mere ephemeral triggers. Now, not only did Cather begin to imprint her own textual style by transposing artistic linguistic forms like portrait, color, impression, design, sketch, pattern, and composition into literary agents, but she also openly advised young writers to use techniques following the "development of modern painting." In turn, she invited them to simplify, to subordinate, to be more vague (1922 "The Novel Démeublé").

The writer does not 'efface' himself, as you say; he loses himself in the amplitude of his impressions and in the exciting business of finding all his memories, long-forgotten scenes and faces, running off his pen, as if they were in the ink, and not in his brain at all.

(Willa Cather. "On Literalness." WCP 178)

References to works of art in One of Ours (1922) are few. Its visible pictures are often ubiquitous photographs, with images that captured the absent or dead. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, and with that fame came the demand for publicity.

Yet scenes like Claude Wheeler loosing himself in the watery, flowering moonrise (206), "The moon swam up over the bare wheat fields, big and magical, like a great flower, Presently he . . . stepped into the tin horse tank. The water had been warmed by the sun all afternoon, and was not much cooler than his body. He stretched himself out in it . . . lay on his back, looking up at the moon. They sky was midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current. One expected to see its great petals open" (206). that opposes Claude Wheeler's wife's sterile vines: transition from Clod in US to Claude, one who appreciates Old World architecture, "Deeper and deeper into flowery France! That was the sentence Claude kept saying over to himself to the jolt of the wheels . . . . " (339). Madame Joubert lays the cloth, "Dinner was very cheerful that evening. M. Joubert was pleased that the storm had not lasted long enough to hurt the wheat. The garden was fresh and bright after the rain. The cherry tree shook down bright drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred. The mother cat dozed on the red cushion in Madame Joubert's sewing chair, and the pigions fluttered down to snap up earthworms that wriggled in the wet sand. The shadow of the house fell over the dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in the full sunlight, and the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured roses. Their petals, ruffled by the rain, gave out a wet, spicy smell" (355). domestic, fecundic French garden that made indelible pictures in themselves. Time passing, evolutionary scale+worm, pidgeon, cat, humans; elemental firey sun, earth wall, wet drops, and spicy breeze, colors yellow, cream, sand, green trees, blue-lavendar shadow, all in one synthe paragraph.

The following year the Russians Léon Bakst and Nicolai Fechin each painted her portrait. Indeed, she struggled to describe Marian Forrester as a "portrait like a thin miniature painted on ivory" in A Lost Lady (WCP 77). Cather seemed to recall the stimulating yet stifling years at McClung's house on Murrayhill which were like the years when Mrs. Forrester lived with her older husband.

Among the many interviews, the one by Walter Tittle stands out for Cather's comments about art, and for his sketch of her. Tittle confirmed that Cather had a remarkable memory for paintings. One recalls that Cather and her character, Miss Kelley, may have both learned the dates and names of an impressive group of artists (WCP 81-85).

Two years later Cather was photographed by Steichen, the society photographer. With the public attention from the Pulitzer Prize came personal loss. The loss of her parents and the separation from old friends left her only with memories. She had accepted the new trends in art and literature, and pictured her text in cubistic terms when she compared the juxtaposed characters in her novel to a Cézannesque green vase and an orange (WCP 23). She mentioned that D. H. Lawrence used the "language of cubisme" in one of his stories (Sergeant 200). But she seemed to compete with the trends stating that, "[Stephen] Crane was one of the first post-impressionist; that he began it before the French painters began it, or at least as early as the first of them" (OW 69).

The following year Cather wrote about the interrelationship of the sister-arts saying, "The major arts (poetry, painting, architecture, sculpture, music) have a pedigree all their own" ("Escapism"). Cather's reference to the major arts endorse her technique of symbolist writing by using a vague fluidity between the arts. In a rather long text she describes how she had composed structure in "The Tom Outland" story in The Professor's House (1925):

But the experiment which interested me was something a little more vague, and was very much akin to the arrangement followed in sonatas in which the academic sonata form was handled somewhat freely. Just before I began the book I had seen, in Paris, an exhibition of old and modern Dutch paintings. In many of them the scene presented was a living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers. But in most of the interiors, whether drawing-room or kitchen, there was a square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships, or a stretch of grey sea. The feeling of the sea that one got through those square windows was remarkable, and gave me a sense of the fleets of Dutch ships that ply quietly on all the waters of the globe— to Java, etc. (Willa Cather. OW 31; my italics)

Essentially, Cather's passage includes not only the Symbolist Correspondances [sic] by using "vague" but loaded words, it also knits together the sister-arts. For instance, the picture of the Dutch fleet is framed like a painting by an architectural feature, the square window. The ships and their masts are sculptural elements inside the picture. The Dutch genre window comprises a separate picture in itself, and then in turn becomes part of the larger scene in the drawing-room. Cather's "arrangement" is harmonious and her prose is poetry in itself. As a result she has involved all of the major arts—architecture, sculpture, music, painting, and prose—framed within the confines of a single passage of "integrated language," in a Symbolist technique set forth by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé (see Lehmann 225).

This complex process in writing becomes what Jan Mukarovsky� called "artistic exploitation of the word" (208). When a textual artist "interpenetrates" her writing with mental drawings as Cather did, she sends powerful unnamed signs to her reader (Mukarovsky� 211). Here Cather uses a series of "signs" in the later manner of Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida. She acts as translator, interpreter, communicator—as "correspondant."

Furthermore Cather interlaces other factors into the text. She arouses the senses of touch, taste, smell, seeing, and hearing, with the words food, copper, hearth, and sea. She invokes the four elements in earth-Mesa, water-sea, air-breeze, and fire-hearth. She draws images of symbolic tension using complementary connectors. Her Old World and New World ships denote the passage of time on the far away and linear blue-grey sea. Seen through a nearby square window the sea ties civilizations together. One imagines the shining round copper pots polished by women who wait ships to return on the sea. Other mental images of Shelley's sparks spring to mind when roused by the Catherian fire that blows from the Old World to the New. Did Cather intentionally write passages like this with forethought, or was her writing a gift of experience and genius? The answer is probably yes to both of these.

Biographer James Woodress stated that "for twenty-five years I've looked for Cather's painting that she described in her letter about The Professor's House but I've never found it in Europe or the U. S. Thus I think she must have invented the painting" (Woodress, James. Personal interview. 15 March 1991). Actually Cather probably did invent the idea, and her example of a Dutch Genre painting seems a cryptic reference since many paintings are refected in that image. One should recall that Cather said that her memories flowed like ink from her pen—and one's memories are not always specific or accurate.

An interesting correlation to Cather's reference to a Dutch Painting is one by Marcel Proust, whom Cather called "the greatest French writer of his time" (1933 NUF 30). In 1921, Proust visited a loan exhibit of Dutch paintings at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. He was so moved by Jan Vermeer's View of Delft that he became "giddy" (Sansom 101). Proust used this dramatic personal episode in his fiction and he portrayed a similar experience for his character Bergotte:

At last he [Bergotte] came to the Vermeer which he remembered as more striking, more different from anything else he knew, but in which, thanks to the critic's article, he noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.

"That's how I ought to have written," he said. "My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall."

(Marcel Proust. The Captive 185)

Was Cather being Proustian in her similar "Dutch window" reference, or did she too see the Dutch paintings exhibited at the Jeu de Paume? Sergeant wrote that in 1919 she "brought her [Cather] a couple of volumes" of Marcel Proust's � la recherche du temps perdu: Du c�té de chez Swann," at a time when Cather continued to prefer French authors (Sergeant 157). Cather was still in France until late October 1920 (Lewis 121), just before Proust's reference to the 1921 Dutch Exhibit. It may be that the Exhibition at the Jeu de Paume lasted from Fall 1920 until Spring 1921, or that it remained in tact until 1923, when Cather was again in Paris. Proust's experience appeared as fiction in The Captive in 1923. That was well before publication of Cather's The Professor's House in 1925, and her explanatory letter concerning it in 1940. For other similarities in Proustian and Cather allusions see A Reader's Guide to Remembrance of Things Past.

Bitterly reflecting on her own increasing losses in her personal life, Cather wrote My Mortal Enemy (1926). The novel is as complex and confusing as an interlaced Celtic page. As if regressing in the visual arts, Cather became preoccupied with black-and-white woodcuts, country press printing, and pictures from a magic-lantern that she saw while she composed Death Comes for the Archbishop at the La Fonda Hotel (1927). In My Mortal Enemy Cather saturated her symbolist language with reflected images of Myra Henshawe (Rosowski VP 70-71).

Cather's novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, is associated with several references to symbolic or narrative art: Puvis de Chavannes' Sainte Genevi�ve frescoes; Holbein's Dance of Death, Vibert's The Missionary's Return, and El Greco's Saint Francis in Meditation, and a Spanish portrait of St. Joseph. In Shadows on the Rock (1931), St. Peter, the Rock, and the Roman Church became one enormous and symbolic tapestry (Gerber 152).

Sir Yehudi recalls that the Hambourgs were "on the Left Bank as we were at the time, and she [Isabelle] and my mother struck up a very, very close friendship. My mother had a flare, a nose as it were for people with a real gift, a rare quality" (Menuhin Interview). In his book he described Isabelle as being "as rich as she was beautiful," stating that Jan Hambourg no longer needed to work after his marriage to the American Heiress. The couple found their Paris place near the Menuhin's rue de S�vres apartment. It was perfect for enjoying the pleasures of good music, books, and gourmet food. With no children of their own they rather adopted the Menuhin children thereby opening a luxurious and sophisticated new world to them (UJ 77-78).

Sir Yehudi said, "My parents came to approve of Isabelle and Jan, and thus we saw a great deal of them at that time in Paris. And it was Isabelle who then thought that we must meet Willa Cather" (Knoll). There are extant but separate photographs of Cather and of the Menuhin family taken at Ville d'Avray, which was the Hambourg's first home in Paris (Woodress 338); however, Sir Yehudi does not remember meeting her there.

Cather continued to travel and returned to Italy in 1935, this time in the North—Genoa, Cortina, and then on to Venice. In her sketch, "Light on the Adobe Wall" (n. d.), she wrote about the mood caused by the chiaroscuro in paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Diego Vel�squez. Yet Cather was always more French than feudal, more Roman than Renaissance as she demonstrates when she inserts Vergil's poetics into her novels (see Olson, p. 263).

In 1938, Cather lost her friend Isabelle McClung. Cather's story, "The Old Beauty," presents elegant Gabrielle Longstreet who takes tea with her friend near the Roman Arch. The scene recalls John Singer Sargent's painting of two old ladies dining under the Roman arches in his Breakfast in the Loggia. Mrs. Longstreet carries in her luggage framed photographs of her lost friends. She loves them now more than ever as she travels to Aix-les-Bain and other resorts. Mrs. Longstreet is reflected in the glass panes of their pictures, mingled with memories that now possess her present ("Old Beauty," 32-33). They are like the shades from Yeats' "Everlasting Voices" (For Yeats as Symbolist, see Lehmann 282). In a metaphorical journey to the Grande-Chartreuse, Mrs. Longstreet "leaned against the stone wall" (64), echoing Matthew Arnold as he leaned beneath an "old-world abbey wall" (l. 170) Again like Arnold, Mrs. Longstreet poetically wanders on high, "between two worlds," before she returns to the descending road. Her car is forced off the road and smashed onto roadside rocks by vulgar American girls who smoke cigarettes. The accident is fatal and leads to the "Old Beauty's" death. (See Sheppard, p. 146, for Arnold's premise that "poetry would come to replace religion and philosophy").

The Old World was indeed dying for Cather, too. Toward the end of her life she had searched the depths of her own childhood memories in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). She reached back into an even darker past—a medieval one, bespoken with the persecution of the Catherites, a sect accused of religious heresy by the Catholic Church. The Catherites are mentioned in Cather's copy of Thomas Okey's book on Avignon (Okey 8). These final works indicate Cather's preoccupation with the dying past while she in her own Palace of Art. Cather's Avignon novel was unfinished.

I lay trying to paint in the darkness. . . . (Willa Cather.
"Old Books and New." Home Monthly June 1897: 14. W & P 351)

My introductory remarks spoke to Cather's magnificent ability to interrelate the arts in specific textual passages. The following study is concerned with individual artists and their paintings who affected Willa Cather's literary work. I have included in a Catalogue Raisonné the said artists and those others who illustrated Cather's fiction. I consider this an experimental idea that reveals previously undocumented similarities between Cather's artistic composition in prose compared to that found in painting. Consequently, I feel a word is in order about why I chose this particular subject and format for my dissertation. Throughout my advanced studies I took a major in English Literature and many courses in Art History, finding the disciplines in some ways similar and compatible. After I completed a Seminar in Cather Studies during my course work, I realized that Willa Cather was a major writer with whom I could personally identify. Like George N. Kates I hoped to "trace [the] typical steps in her process of assimilation" of the arts (WCE 68).

Furthermore, I needed to prove that Willa Cather really did use visual allusion in the manner that I thought she did. And finally I wished to argue that Cather was a multi-disciplined artist like her near contemporaries, Bastien-Lepage, Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, Blake, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, John LaFarge, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and D. H. Lawrence. After my research, I was able to match several of Cather's literary allusions to a specific painting. This fact affirms her understanding of pictorial art that she used to inform her fiction.

As a result of my extensive research and travel, I have prepared an alphabetized list of visual artists associated with Willa Cather, the textual artist. I have followed the lead of Richard Giannone when he considered music in Cather's fiction. I recognize the prismatic nature of Cather's writing, and in some cases, it was impossible to isolate the visuals from Cather's synthesized allusions. One should do a study involving all of the major sister-arts found in Cather's writing and then compare them to the methods used by the Impressionist painters, and/or to literary allusions employed by the Symbolist writers; and ideally, one also might identify all engravings in her texts. But this is not an ideal world, and time is a pressing consideration. Therefore, I leave such comparisons and extensions to future reseachers. Certainly I've fallen victim to specialization, to tunnel vision, to blind spots. Yet like Manet and Cather before me I also hope to "break down the prison of the medium" (Manet 37).

Why do scholars need such a work? First, because the Catalogue Raisonné provides support—yes, even proof that a prose artist who makes allusions to the visual arts possesses the experience and knowledge to use them freely and intelligently. Second, the Catalogue is a convenient and accurate listing of artists and works referred to by Cather, and most entries states the work's location. Third, the artist-listings are cross-referenced with Cather's writings that help explain their context. For example, her use of visuals may color a mood, inform a character's personality or intellect, describe a place, a philosophical theorem, a social or historical setting. Occasionally the visuals are straight-forward references, but sometimes they are hidden, or only hinted at. Often I have added my own brief commentary. In either case Cather brings the major sister-arts into attendance through other perceptions about the characters and scenes that they inform. Wonderfully Cather's allusions act as a conduit, a translator, a connector for the vague "verbal mood" so important to one possessed by pictures in her prose.

Arnold, Matthew. "Stanzas form the Grande Chartreuse." Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1968: 476-78.

The Art of Willa Cather. Ed. Bernice Slote and Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974 [AWC].

Brown, E. K. "Homage to Willa Cather." 36 Yale Review (Autumn 1946): 77-92; also in Willa Cather: A Critical Biography. Completed by Leon Edel. 1953. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1987: 340.

Byrne, Kathleen D. and Richard C. Snyder, ed. Chrysalis:Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1896-1906. Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1982 passim.

Carnegie Catalogues: First Annual Exhibition, Nov. 5, 1896 to Jan 1, 1897; Second Annual Exhibition, Nov. 4, 1897 to Jan. 1, 1898. Pittsburgh PA: Carnegie Art Gallery Library.

Cather, Willa. Alexander's Bridge. Introduction by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1977.

———. "Escapism." Commonweal 23 (17 Apr. 1936): 677-79; also in Willa Cather on Writing: CriticalStudies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1988: 18-29.

———. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893-1896. Sel. and ed. with comm. by Bernice Slote. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966.

———. "Light on the Adobe Wall." In Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln: Bison- U of Nebraska P, 1988: 123-26.

———. "The Novel D�meubl�." In Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln: Bison- U of Nebraska P, 1988: 35-43.

———. My �ntonia. 1918. With Illustrations by W. T. Benda. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926.

———. The Old Beauty and Others. New York: Knopf, 1948.

———. "On the Divide." Overland Monthly 27 (Jan. 1896): 65-74; Crane AA7; WCCSF 494-504.

———. "On the Professor's House." 1938 Letter. In Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1988: 30-32.

———. O Pioneers! Boston: Houghton, 1913.

———. The Professor's House. New York: Knopf, 1925.

———. "Stephen Crane's Wounds in the Rain." In Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1988: 67-74.

———. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. NY: Knopf, 1940.

———. The Song of the Lark. Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.

———. "Utterly Irrelevant [Nebraska State Fair Art-Exhibit]." Nebraska State Journal 13; KA 183, 362.

———. Willa Cather Collected Short Fiction. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Introduction by Mildred Bennett. 1965. Rev. ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970.

———. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Sel. and ed. L. Brent Bohlke. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986 [WCP].

*———. CATHER ARTICLES, see below*:

Gerber, Philip L. "Willa Cather and the Big Red Rock." College English 19 (Jan.): 152-57.

Giannone, Richard [John]. Music in Willa Cather's Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968.

"Half a Century of American Exhibitions." Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago 1888-1950. Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Art Institute of Chicago, p. 9.

Haydon Catalogues: Third Annual Exhibit and Fourth Annual Exhibit (1891) of the Haydon Art Club. Haydon Art Club Program, 1893-94. MS #378 N 30. Lincoln NE: held at the Sheldon Art Gallery Library, University Campus.

Hueffer, Ford Madox. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Critical Monograph. New York: Dutton, 1907.

James, Henry. "Our Artists in Europe." Harper's 79 (June- Nov. 1889): 48-66.

Kates, George N. In Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey. Introd. and notes by Kates. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 1988.

Lehmann, A. G. The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1895. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950.

M�le, Emile. The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France in the Thirteenth Century. 1913. Trans. Dora Nussey. New York: Icon-Harper, 1972.

Manet: 1832-1883. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art- Abrams, 1983.

Mukarovsky�, Jan. "Between Literature and the Visual Arts." The Word and Verbal Art. Trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven, Yale UP, 1977: 205-34.

Okey, Thomas. Story of Avignon. Illust. by Percy Wadham. 1911. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd. Bedford Street, Covent Garden, W. C. New York: Dutton, 1926.

Olson, Paul A. "The Epic and Great Plains Literature: Rolvaag, Cather and Neihardt." Prairie Schooner 55 (Spring-Summer): 263-85.

Pre-Raphaelite Papers. Ed. Leslie Parris. London: Tate Gallery, 1984.

Proust, Marcel. A Reader's Guide to Remembrance of Things Past. Compiled by Terence Kilmartin. New York: Random, 1983. Cather was in Paris in 1920; exhibition

dates may be checked at the R�union des mus�e nationaux 60 ter, rue de Lille, 75007 Paris, France.

———. La Prisonni�re or The Captive. 1923. Vol. 3. Trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.

Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World's Fair. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993.

Rosowski, Susan. "Death Comes for the Archbishop: A Miracle of Symbolic Sight." The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986: 169-74.

———. "Discovering Symbolic Meaning: Teaching with Willa Cather." English Journal 71 (Dec.): 14-17.

———. "Willa Cather and the French Rural Tradition of Br�ton and Millet." The Rural Vision: France and America in the Late Nineteenth Century. Ed. Hollister Sturges. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987: 53-60.

Sansom, William. Proust and His World. New York: Scribner's, 1973.

Schwind, Jean. "The Benda Illustrations to My �ntonia: Cather's 'Silent' Supplement to Jim Burden's Narrative." PLMA 100.1 (Jan.-May 1985): 51-67.

———. "Fine and Folk Art in The Song of the Lark." Cather Studies Volume 1. Ed. Susan J. Rosowski. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990: 89-102.

———. "Pictorial Art in Willa Cather's Fiction." Ph.D. Diss., U of Minnesota P, 1983: passim.

Sheppard, Anne. Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Oxford: Opus-Oxford UP, 1988.

Stouck, David. "Willa Cather and the Impressionist Novel." Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Ed. John J. Murphy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984: Part III, 58-63.

Symons, Arthur. "The Decadent Movement in Literature." 1893. Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1968: 903-909; later published in book-form, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).

Tittle, Walter. "Glimpses of Interesting Americans." Century Magazine 11.1 (1925): 309-13.

Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir. Photographs by Lucia Woods and Others. Text by Bernice Slote. 1973. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.

Whistler, James McNeill. "Ten o'Clock" Lecture. 1885. In Victorian Poetry and Poetics. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1968: 898.

Yeats, William B. "The Everlasting Voices." The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: the Poems: Volume 1. New York: Macmillan, 1989.

*CATHER ARTICLES in which she refers to Art in chronological order: "The Pittsburgh Art Exhibit" Home Monthly 6.6 (Jan. 1897): 10, and 7.5 (Dec 1898); "Low and Bouguereau" Lincoln Courier 30 Oct. 1897: 3; "A Pittsburgh Artist in His Studio" Home Monthly (Aug. 1898): 18-19; "Fra Angelico" Home Monthly (9 Apr. 1899): 1-3; "A Painter's Jest" Home Monthly (Jan 1900): 24; "A Philistine in the Gallery" Library (21 Apr. 1900): 8-9; "The midsummer exhibit" Library (28 July 1900): 8-9; "The Philistine in the Art Gallery" Pittsburgh Gazette 17 Nov. 1901: 6; "Popular Pictures" Pittsburgh Gazette 24 Nov 1901: 6; "Chase, Chicago Art Institute" Lincoln Courier 10 Aug. 1901: 1-3. In addition, Cather wrote two articles in Washington, "In the Corcoran Gallery, on Joseph Jefferson Nebraska State Journal 6 Jan. 1901: 14, Painter"; and "On Hubert Vos's Racial Studies" also at the Corcoran, Nebraska State Journal 3 Jan. 1901: 9. In Europe, see "Seeing Things in London" Nebraska State Journal 10 Aug. 1902: 11; "The Kensington Studio" Nebraska State Journal 17 Aug. 1902: 11; "Dieppe and Rouen" Nebraska State Journal 31 Aug. 1902: 16; "One Sunday at Barbizon" Nebraska State Journal 21 Sep. 1902: 18. For later important references to Art see "The Novel D�meubl�"; A Letter From Willa Cather to the Editor of Commonweal"; "My First Novels"; "A Letter to Gov. Wilbur Cross"; "Escapism"; "Letter on The Professor's House."

[A][B][C][D][E][F][G][H][I][J][K][L][M[N][O][P][Q][R][S][T][U][V][W][X][Y][Z]

To catalogue the names of pictures without accompanying reproductions is wearisome and profitless, and I will not attempt it. (Willa Cather. "The Kensington Studio." Nebraska State Journal 17 August 1902: 11)

Abbey, Edwin Austin. American painter, water colorist, b. Philadelphia PA, 1852; d. London, 1911. Abbey served as a Carnegie Advisory-Board Member, a Member of Royal Academy of Arts in London, and belonged to the Societ� des Artistes Fran�ais in Paris. He received an Honorary MA from Yale University.

The Penance of Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (1900). Oil on canvas. 7' 1" x 4' 1". Listed as #1 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue where The Penance of Eleanor; acquired in 1902 by the Carnegie Museum of Art [afterward known as "Carnegie." Carnegie Institute, 440 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh PA. 15213-0480]. Illustrated in Lucas, E. V. Edwin Austin Abbey: Royal Academician, The Record of His Life and Works. 2 vols. London: Methuen; New York: Scribner's, 1920: opposite p. 352. Abbey's theme in the painting is derived from William Shakespeare's Henry VI (II.II.IV).

Cather: "Edna was much impressed by the Abbey, and the splendor of the nobles and prelates . . . " ("The Philistine in the Art Gallery." Pittsburgh Gazette 24 Nov. 1901: 6 [Crane D536]; W & P 867).

In 1895, Abbey executed "The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail," a series of fifteen wall paintings based on Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." The paintings decorate the Delivery Room in the Boston Public Library; Puvis de Chavannes and John Singer Sargent also painted frescoes there. These magnificent decorations caused Ernest Fenollosa, then the Curator of Oriental Art at Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to call the collection the "Assisi of American art" (See A Handbook to the Art and Architecture of the Boston Public Library. Boston: Associates, 1987: 41-45. Cather lived on nearby Chestnut Street when she researched [and primarily wrote] Mary Baker G. Eddy's life for S. S. McClure (see McClure's 29 (June 1907): 134 for an Editorial Announcement of Part II of "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy," in the forthcoming July, Aug., and Sep. issues). See Cather, Willa and Georgine Milmine. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. Introduction and afterword by David Stouck. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993.

Abbey also was a prominent illustrator for Harper's Magazine, and there was a great need for artists to make picturesque drawings at home and abroad since a new photogravure process, called the collotype method was developed. This process enabled magazines to print more illustrations so demanded by their readers. In due course, Abbey moved permanently to England where he concentrated on literary themes, especially those of Shakespeare.

Cather: "On either side of it [a Shropshire river] are the pollard willows to which Mr. Abbey, the painter, so utterly lost his heart when Harper Brothers sent him into rural England in his youth to make some drawings for them" (WCE 30).

In England Abbey was chosen by the new King to paint the royal portrait of the Coronation, The Coronation of King Edward VII (1902-04). That was same summer Cather first visited England. Abbey remained a steadfast friend of his fellow-artist from Pennsylvania, C. S. Reinhart, and Henry James admired the two of them. See James' erudite discussion of Abbey and Reinhart as he mused, with some envy, "It is true that what the verbal artist would like to do would be to find out the secret of the pictorial, to drink at the same fountain [of "genius and imagination"] (James, Henry. "Our Artists in Europe." Harper's 79 (June-Nov. 1889): 48-66). For commentary on James' interest in synaesthesia—the mixing paint and prose, see Winner, Viola Hopkins. "Art Devices and Parallels in the Fiction." Henry James and the Visual Arts. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1970: 71-93. Also see Murphy, John. "Nebraska Naturalism in Jamesian Frames." Great Plains Quarterly 4 (Fall): 231-37 [Arnold 1984.56].

�coma. Legendary altar-painting of St. Joseph, originally sent from Spain to the �coma Pueblo NM.

Cather: "At �coma," he said, "you can see something very holy. They have there a portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the Kings of Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles. If the season is dry, the �coma people take the picture down to their farms at Acomita, and it never fails to produce rain. They have rain when none falls in all the country, and they have crops when the Laguna Indians have none" (DCA 88, again on 197).

In Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather leaves a question for reader as to whether or not the painting of St Joseph might be the lost St. Francis by El Greco; in any case the purpose of the painting shifts slightly from an interceding Saint devoted to the worker to become a fetish for rain-making. A painting still hangs above the �coma altar. Unfortunately photography is not allowed inside San Esteban de �coma Mission, and no slide is currently available (Tenorio, Mary. "Letter to author." 25 Oct. 1992. Pueblo de �coma, Acomita, NM 87034).

Cather: "Hundreds of years ago, before European civilizations had touched this continent, Indian women in the old rock-perched pueblos of the southwest were painting geometrical patterns on jars . . . " (1936 "Escapism," in On Writing 19).

Cather knew about the �coma Pueblo very early. In an 1897 article, "The Carnegie Museum," she reported on the Natural History Museum's display cases that portrayed the life of the ancient Native Americans. Four of the cases are in the Museum: two cases include a replicas in high-relief of the [Anasazi] Cliff-Dwellings at Mesa Verde, Rio Mancos in southwest Colorado (Case Acc.#140-4); another nearby case holds an architectural reconstruction of New Mexico's �coma Pueblo. The four cases of the ancient ruins and so-called "modern pueblos" were given to the Carnegie Museum in 1896 by Ward's National Scientific Company of Rochester, New York (Harding, Deborah G, Carnegie's Anthropological Collection. "Letter to author." 28 Mar 1991. Carnegie Museum of Natural History). A new Hall of Native Americans is planned for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the fate of the cases is unknown at the time of this writing. See "Talking to Marsha Bol." Carnegie Magazine (May/June 1991): 30-35, 38.

Cather: "[A] model of homes of the Cliff Dweller and one of Montezuma's well stand upon tables at each side of the door which opens into the first room" ("The Carnegie Museum." Home Monthly 6.8 (1897): 1-4).

Cather's mention of the clay models in these display cases are the earliest touchstones to the Southwest that suggest later fictional incidents in the �coma chapter in Death Comes for the Archbishop and the "Tom Outland's Story" in The Professor's House. Later in New York, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remarked on Cather's interest in the "cliff-dweller finds" at Natural History Museum in New York City (Sergeant 122).

Cather: "I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as a sculpture—and something like a composition

. . . . It was more like a sculpture than anything else" (The Professor's House 210). See Cases Cliff-Dwelling Display Case, Cliff Dweller's Tower, and �coma "Sky City." See Rosowski, Susan J. and Bernice Slote. "Willa Cather's 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Professor's House." Prairie Schooner 58.4 (Winter 1984): 81-92. See Holmes, W. H. Report in the U. S. Geological Survey of the Territory, 1873, 1879. Also Harrell, David. From Mesa Verde to The Professor's House. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1993.

Aherns, Ellen Wetherald. Philadelphia, b. 1832; d. 1953. Aherns studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia; Carnegie Medal Winner of the Second Class.

Sewing-A Portrait. Oil on canvas. #4 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue, illus.; Aherns' painting was also exhibited at the Art Institute in 1901 (Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1888-1950: 53).

Cather: "Hitherto Sergeant Kendall's 'Mother and Child' was the most popular picture which had ever received a prize at the Institute, but, in regard of the people who come and go, it has been quite overshadowed by Ellen Ahern's [sic] portrait of an old lady sewing, which was awarded the medal of the class" ("The Philistine in the Gallery." Review of the 1901 Carnegie International Exhibition; W & P 865 [Crane D536]).

Alexander, Francis+. Painter of Charles Dickens (1842). At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA.

Cather described "Mrs. Fields reclining on a green sofa, directly under the youthful portrait of Charles Dickens (now in the Boston Art Museum)." (From "The House on Charles Street." New York Evening Post 4 Nov. 1922: 173-4 [Crane D584]; Cather's text was later extended in "148 Charles Street." Not Under Forty: 54 [Crane A21]). In this article Cather also refers to Annie Fields' friend, "Mrs. [Isabella] John Gardner." Her home is now the notable Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston.

Alexander, John White. American painter and illustrator, b. Allegheny PA, 1865; d. New York City, 1915; Carnegie Jury of Award and Advisory Member. Alexander was represented in the Luxembourg, in collections in Vienna, St. Petersburg, New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh. This prominent Pittsburgh artist served as a member of several International Art Societies. He rose to become the President of America's National Academy of Design and was also a Member of the Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Rose+ or A Woman in Rose. #7 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue, illus. At the Carnegie, acq. in #[19]01.2.

Pot of Basil+ (1897). Listed as #6, it was exhibited at Carnegie Second Annual in 1897-89, and later won a Carnegie Medal in 1911. Now at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, acq. #[18]98.181. It is highly probable that Cather saw Alexander's impressive oil painting either in Boston or Pittsburgh. Alexander's picture takes its name from John Keats' poem, "Isabella, or The Pot of Basil."

Cather: "Our painters are perhaps chiefly remarkable for their absolute mastery of their medium, the sureness and freedom of their technique. To realize how indisputably this is true one has only to examine the American pictures purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Gallery. In the room devoted to foreign art the pictures by Whistler, Alexander, Sargent, Ben Foster and Winslow Homer are conspicuous for their technical excellence and in this respect are comparable only to the work of the masters of modern France" (Written just after Cather's first trip to Europe for the Pittsburgh Gazette 30 Nov. 1902 [Crane D563]; W & P 883).

Pennsylvania artists Edwin Abbey and C. S. Reinhart met John White Alexander while they were working as illustrators for Harper & Brothers. They encouraged him to study in Paris, and eventually he did. As a promising young American artist in Paris, Alexander saw his work enter the distinguished Luxembourg Museum. Before returning to America, he visited Munich, met Whistler in Venice, and journeyed on to Florence to view its frescoes. Alexander is best known in this country for his subdued portraits of women and for his murals in the Library of Congress.

Near the end of his life Alexander returned to Paris. There he became interested in the Symboliste "notion of correspondances, where one sense recalls another" and soon adopted some of these theories. His late avant-garde style merged with his earlier "other-worldly" forms, best portrayed in his work The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh or The Crowning of Labor, that he executed for the Carnegie Institute around 1906. See the Exhibition Catalogue, John White Alexander: Corrrespondances. New York: Graham Gallery, 1014 Madison Ave at 78th, Oct. 30-Dec. 1985: 3. Also see Moore, Sarah J. "In Search of an American Iconography." Winterthur Portfolio 25 (Winter 1990): 321-39.

It is possible that one of John White Alexander's paintings, The Brooklyn Bridge, may have directly influenced Cather's choice of title for her first novel, Alexander's Bridge. In the Introduction to Alexander's Bridge, Bernice Slote quotes Cather's comparison of the novel's composition to a painted composition:

Cather: "My first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was very like what painters call a studio picture" (AB. Ed. Slote 91; Cather's article originally appeared in the Colophon, part 6.4: 21; reprn't as "My First Novels," in OW 91).

After several suicides, the Brooklyn Bridge became a popular subject for artists, writers, and painters. Cather probably remembered The Brooklyn Bridge by Alexander [consequently, Alexander's Bridge] and then transposed the idea of the title to Alexander's Bridge in a kind of "artistic correspondance," used by the French Symbolist writers. Cather often merged various sources and images into one, as did her French contemporary writer Marcel Proust.

Upon publication of the novel Cather stated that "'The only kind of bridge in the story . . . is a cantilever bridge'" (New York Sun 25 May 1912; reprn't as "Explaining Her Novel" in WCP 6). Although the Brooklyn Bridge is technically a suspension-bridge, it is in part a cantilever-bridge located very near Cather's Washington Place apartment when she wrote the Alexander's Bridge (Woodress 217, 225). So, there seems a probable connection between Cather's title for Alexander's Bridge (whose character's last name is also Alexander) and John White Alexander's painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. (The story was also published in serial-form as "Alexander's Masquerade" (McClure's 38.4 (Feb. 1912) [Crane CCC1]).

Posthumously his peers praised Alexander for his popular city-scape style: "[H]is sense of pattern and of line, of long, sweeping curves, never failed him" (Edwin H. Blashfield. "Alexander." 1917 reprint. American Academy of Art and Letters: Notes and Monographs, 1922: 7). For a reproduction of John White Alexander's Brooklyn Bridge see p. 198a, 199 of the University of Michigan zeroxed version of Eddy, Arthur Jerome. Cubists and Post-Impressionists. McClurg & Co, 1914. The Brooklyn Bridge by Alexander apparently was mis-photocopied by the University of Michigan and substituted for another painting in the original version. This is the only illustration that can be found; see 1970 University Microfilms, University Microfilms Limited, High Wycombe, England, A Xerox Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U. S. A., available from the U. of Missouri—Columbia, page between 198 and 199. One might try the Prints and Photographs Division, The Library of Congress, Wash DC 20540. For another nearly identical, postcard view of the Brooklyn Bridge that Cather sent to a friend see Ruzicka in this Catalogue.

Alma-T�dema, Sir Lawrence. Historical painter, sometimes classed as a Pre-Raphaelite, b. Dronrijp, Holland, 1836; d. Wiesbaden, Germany, 1912. Alma-T�dema was trained at the Antwerp Academy, moved to London in 1870; became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1876; exhibited in the 1896 First Carnegie International; and later became a Jury of Award and Advisory Member. He was knighted in 1899. Alma-T�dema painted authentic scenes of ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt. For his "Sappho" see Muthers, Richard. Muthers's The History of Modern Painting. 4 vols. Rev. ed. London: Dent, 1907: vol. 3, Plate 123. His work for rich Victorian patrons also included sumptuous nudes with erotic love as an underlying theme. Also see Rooses' Dutch Painters of the Nineteenth-Century, p. 141-64.

Hero+. #9 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue.

Cather: "[T]he Alma-Tadema she [Myrtle the Philistine] not undiscriminatingly remarked looked like Sarah Bernhardt" (Review: "The Philistine" [Crane D536] W & P 867). This is an example of Cather's wry humor since the Alma-T�dema's picture was called Hero.

Curiously, Cather was so interested in Alma-T�dema that she wrote an article about the artist and his home, but we know very little about her reason for doing so. Earlier, because of an illness, Cather had to miss giving a student lecture to the Haydon Art Club, in Lincoln, listed for:

Feb. 20, 1894: "Japanese and Chinese Architecture, and Interior Decorations," by Mr. Will O. Jones.

Feb. 29, 1894: "Houses and Homes of England and Germany," by Miss Cather. See "Houses and Homes of All Ages," Haydon Art Club Program for the Academic Year 1893-4. Available at Sheldon Art Gallery Library, MS #378 N 30, Lincoln NE. Also see Slote, Kingdom of Art p. 21, but date seems incorrect.

With improved methods of photo-reproduction of paintings, drawings, and photographs, and with reader demand for more pictures, McClure's Magazine had illustrations on nearly every page. The magazine often featured popular biographical sketches, portraying both the homes and lives of famous people such as Zola, Ruskin, and Daudet. Cather may have used this McClure's article about Alma-T�dema (Nov. 1896, pp. 32 ff.) as a basis for her own article on his London studio (Courier 7 Jan. 1899: 11; W & P 49). While in Pittsburgh and Washington Cather wrote several of articles about artists in their home studios that led her to visit those of other artists in England. For an article about Cather's Red Cloud home, see Magida, Arthur. "In the Land of Literary Lions." Historic Preservation 40 (Mar./Apr. 1988): 42-47.

Aman-Jean, Edmond-Fran�ois. French painter, etcher, and color lithographer, b. Chevry-Cossigny, Seine-le-Marne, 1860; d. Paris, 1935.

Comedy. Listed as #10 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue, illus.

Cather: "Aman-Jean's delicate and subtle 'Comedy' is passed with equal carelessness" ("The Philistine" [Crane D536] W & P 868). See Simon in this Catalogue for a painting of Aman-Jean's studio.

Anderson, Frederic A. Anderson illustrated three Romanticized watercolors for Cather's short story, "Three Women." Ladies' Home Journal Sep., Oct., Nov. 1932: 3, 18, 16 [Crane C59]; also titled "Old Mrs. Harris" without illustrations as it appears in Obscure Destinies.

Andr�, Albert. French painter, b. Paris 1869.

The River Seine or Autumn Scene on the Seine. #12 in the 1901 Carnegie Exhibition Catalogue. Several of Andr�'s works are at the Phillips Gallery, Washington DC. See Cather's Review: "Popular Pictures." Pittsburgh Gazette 24 Nov. 1901: 6 [Crane D537]; W & P 869. Also see Monro, Isabel Stevenson and Kate M. Monro. Index to Reproductions of European Painting: A Guide to Pictures in More Than Three Hundred Books. 1956. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1961: 31.

Angelico, Fra—Frate Giovanni da Fiesole or da Firenze, also known as "Guido di Pietro." Italian miniaturist, panel and fresco painter, b. Vicchio in the Mugello, c. 1400; d. Rome, c. 1455. Fra Angelico was a mystical and pious painter in the Early Italian Renaissance.

The Coronation of the Virgin+ (c. 1435). Panel. 6' 11" x 6' 11" at the Louvre.

Cather: "Above the mantel were delicate reproductions in color of some of Fra Angelico's most beautiful paintings" (WCCSF 283).

And again Cather: "A lovely soul; a saintly nature; a man who with the highest genius, in the midst of the fiercest temptations of turbulent times, learned the true secret of living, to 'render unto God the things which are God's,' such a man was Guido da Petri—Giovanni of Fiesole, Fra Beato, the painter of angels, the angelic painter" (signed Nixon, Mary F. [a.k.a. Willa Cather]. "Fra Angelico, The Painter of Angels, and His Famous Paintings." Home Monthly 7.9 (9 Apr. 1899): 1-3, with illustrations of Fra Angelico's [a.k.a. Guido] Easter Morning—Our Lord Appears to Mary Magdalene. The article was published before her first trip to Europe in 1902.

Cather: "She was just a wee mite of a thing, with brow hair that fluffed about her face and eyes that were large and soft like those of Guido's penitent Magdalen"

("A Resurrection" WCCSF 432).

As she refers to Fra Angelico's reproductions, Cather establishes her familiarity with the many art books held by the wonderful Carnegie Library. She wrote her friend that she thought the Carnigie owned every book possible (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Neddy: p. 6" C. 1898. Holograph letter in the Slote Collection, Library Archives, University of Nebraska). For listings of many art references see the End Notes of the early Carnegie Exhibition Catalogues, in Pittsburgh.

Fra Angelico was a member of the Dominican Order at San Marco's Monastery in Florence, Italy. His famous altarpiece graces the San Marco Church. More than forty marvelous cell and corridor frescoes [including The Annunciation] may be seen today in the adjoining Monastery, now the Museo di San Marco. He also painted vault frescoes in the Orvieto Cathedral, and the Cortona Triptych which is now in the Museo Diocesano, Cortona. Later Fra Angelico rose to become a Dominican Prior and eventually was entombed at San Maria Sopra Minerva, the Dominican Church in Rome (Pope-Hennessy, John. Angelico. Florence, Italy: Scala, 1981, passim).

There are no documents to indicate that Cather visited Florence where she could have seen Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco's. Yet she traveled in Italy and was as close as Venice in 1935. Logically, one may assume that she saw Fra Angelico's St. Stephen and St. Lawrence frescoes (1445-1499) in Rome's Chapel of Nicholas V, at the Vatican in 1908. Other than reproductions of Fra Angelico's work, she doubtless knew were his the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin+ and the Madonna della Stella+ which is a reliquary-panel at Isabella Gardner's Museum, in Boston.

Applegate, Guy Frank. New Mexico painter, ceramist, sculptor, poet, essayist; b. Atlanta IL, 1882; d. Santa Fe NM, 1934.

Cather mentions Frank Applegate in a letter to Mary Austin in which she responds to a call for financial assistance for their mutual friend (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Mary Austin." 22 Oct. 1931. Huntington Library CA.

This letter is paraphrased in the Willa Cather Correspondence. Archives, University of Nebraska-Lincoln 68588).

Frank Applegate and Mary Hunter Austin worked together on the Spanish Colonial Arts Society to restore New Mexico's Sancturario at Chimay�. The Sancturario appears in Cather's novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. There is some question as to the amount of time and to the purpose of Cather's visit Mary Austin's home while writing Death; however, letters show that Cather did go there, as invited by Austin when away in 1926. Applegate had also advised Austin on the construction of her beautiful house on Camino del Monte Sol (now the Gerald Peters Gallery) in Santa F�. The Gerald Peters Gallery recently showed his work in "Selections from the Estates of Ward Lockwood and Frank Applegate," from Oct. 11 to Nov. 11, 1991.

Obviously, the New York writers, painters, and publishers formed a tight, interconnecting community even while they were in New Mexico. Applegate also knew the Taos artist E. L. Blumenschein, who knew Cather when they both worked at McClure's Magazine. Two years after Knopf, Inc. released Death Comes for the Archbishop, Applegate published "Indian Stories from the Pueblos,"—a subject dear to Cather. Witter Bynner wrote the Introduction; he was also formerly at McClure's Magazine (Samuels, Peggy and Harold. The Illustrated Biographical Encyclopedia of Artist of the American West. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976: 9).

It appears that at the very least there was a common interest in the Southwestern culture that existed between Cather and Applegate. Applegate's work resembles that of water-colorist John Marin in its Cubist's composition. Cather was interested in the geometrics and juxtapositions of Cubist art and related its methods to her own textual techniques. For example, Death Comes for the Archbishop could be thought of as an architectonical novel, because its chapters build on and around each other in cube-like composition. Applegate is listed here because of a review of Death Comes for the Archbishop by Arnold Ronnebeck in which he compares Cather's verbal artistry to Applegate watercolors (Denver CO Rocky Mountain News Autumn 1927, n. d., n. p [Arnold 1927.33]. See Armory Show in this Catalogue.

Armory Show. Properly titled The International Exhibition of Modern Art, the show was held at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, February 17, 1913. The Armory Show brought the foremost examples of radical Cubism and Fauvism to the attention of more than 70,000 American viewers.

Undoubtedly, given her documented interest in Post-Impressionist art, Cather was aware of this huge exhibit. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant described Cather as intensely interested in new European art-movements. By 1913 they were discussing the issue both in letters and in person (Sergeant 98). While Sergeant was still in France and before the Armory Show, she had already commissioned a portrait by the Cubist/Fauvist painter, Auguste Chabaud.

Sergeant concerning Cather and Cubism: "I must have written Willa about . . . my walks with Proven�al artists and writers in the dry Alpilles; and how my portrait was painted by a Cubist from a vine-yard—un sauvage, a wild man, he called himself, a 'Fauve,' who had already exhibited in New York."

"Willa was intrigued, especially by the Cubist. She was determined I should expound modern art to her" (Sergeant 98).

"She asked me many questions about the wild man from a Proven�al vineyard, a petit bourgeois by birth, who had got to painting in this new and startling way. In later life, nothing interested her less than what the French call le mouvement, in poetry or novels. The avant-garde. . . . But in 1913, the story of le sauvage, as his mother called him, and above all, his new way of painting, piqued her interest."

"I had told Willa that the artist's parents had opposed his study of painting until he ran away and shipped out as a sailor. That act of rebellion had made his family allow him to study at the Beau Arts. He found he was a Cubist, malgr� lui—he'd never heard of cubism before he started practicing it. But the Cubists had a formula and that had alienated him."

"So he threw away cubism, and started hunting for his own style. . . . I showed Willa the abstract drawings mostly on the back of menus" (Sergeant, Elizabeth. Willa Cather: A Memoir. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1953: 114-15).

The Armory Show Program lists Auguste Elis� Chabaud as entering Le troupeau sort apr�s la pluie in the monumental exhibition (1913 Armory Show, illus. 180). John Quinn, the speaker who opened the Armory Show, bought one of Chabaud's paintings (1913 34). After a dynamic showing in New York City, the International Exhibition of Modern Art moved to the Art Institute of Chicago where it drew around 200,000 viewers from March to April (1913 35). Arthur Jerome Eddy, the noted Chicago attorney and collector of avant-garde paintings, owned another Chabaud entitled The Laborer (1913 185). Eddy even retired from his law practice to defend the Post-Modernist painters. His persuasive book, Cubists and Post-Impressionism, continues to be a definitive one. See Eddy, A. J. Cubists and Post-Impressionists. Chicago: McClurg, 1914. Organized by Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute. New York: Henry Street Settlement, 1963: 4, 180, 185. Also see Rich, Daniel Catton. "Half a Century of American Exhibitions," p. 12; available at Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago.

As an art movement, Fauvism is generally identified with Henri Matisse and Cubism with C�zanne, yet, Matisse was the first one to use the word "cubism" while describing paintings by Picasso and Braque at the Paris Salon, in 1908. Formerly Matisse was a traditionalist painter and had studied with both the Academician Bouguereau and the Symbolist Moreau before becoming a skilled copyist at the Louvre. Much later an art-historian would write : "Behind all the daring of the Fauve paintings which Matisse showed at the Salon d'Automne of 1905 lay the experience and discipline of a mature mind, well-versed in the traditions of the French school" (Rewald, John. "An Introduction to the Fauve Movement." Les Fauves. New York: Simon and Schuster, for the Museum of Modern Art, 1952: 5-14).

In 1905, Matisse and other former students of Gustave Moreau held their first so-called "Fauve" exhibition at the Autumn Salon in Paris. The shocking and brilliant colors in the paintings caused the critic Louis Vauxcelles to call the exhibiting artists "fauves or wild beasts." Its larger group included such painters as Matisse, Georges Rouault, Andr� Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, and George Braque. Fauvism virtually ended as a movement by 1908, yet its art looked forward to the twentieth century.

Conceivably Cather heard of the new movement while she was in Paris in 1906. At that time American expatriates Gertrude and Leo Stein were already collecting avant-garde French art including Matisse's Blue Nude. Or Cather may have visited Alfred Stieglitz's famous "291" Gallery in New York, where Matisse had a one-man show in 1908 (Elderfield 180). Photographer Edward Steichen, who was Stieglitz's partner in Europe, arranged for the show. In 1927, Steichen photographed Cather in her middy-blouse and tie, but there is little or no documentation showing that she knew either Stieglitz or Steichen in 1908. For Matisse, see Elderfield, John. Henri Matisse: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992.

The New York-Chicago "Armory Show" exhibit later moved to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. There it aroused little interest from Boston patrons. Cather referred to Cubist painting in a tribute to Mrs. Annie Fields, in Boston before 1922, over ten years after its conception.

Cather: [Mrs. Fields] "was not, as she once laughingly told me, 'to escape anything, not even free verse or the Cubists!' She was not in the least dashed by either. Oh, no she said, the Cubists weren't any queerer than Manet and the Impressionists were when they first came to Boston, and people used to run in for tea and ask her whether she had ever heard of such a thing as 'blue snow,' or a man's black hat being purple in the sun!" ("The House on Charles Street" New York Evening Post 4 Nov. 1922: 173-4; later, "148 Charles Street" [Crane D584]).

Summing up, Cather had the opportunity to study the radical Post-Impressionist art in each of three cities and also in Paris and her quote reveals her grasp of Cubist techniques in painting. See 1913 Armory Show: 50th Anniversary Exhibition, 1963.

Despite the fact that Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant felt that Cather had dismissed Cubisme or "le mouvement, in poetry and novels" Cather obviously experimented with similar techniques by using Cubism's fictional counterparts: the elimination of details, a distorted perspective, and the juxtaposition of both colors or characters:

Cather: "What I always want to do is to make the 'writing' count for less and less and the people for more. In this new novel I'm trying to cut out all analysis, observation, description, even the picture-making quality, in order to make things and people tell their own story simply by juxtaposition, without any persuasion or explanation on my part."

"Just as if I put here on the table a green vase, and beside it a yellow orange. Now, those two things affect each other. Side by side, they produce a reaction which neither of them will produce alone. Why should I try to say anything clever, or by any colorful rhetoric detract attention from those two objects, the relation they have to each other and the effect they have upon each other? I want the reader to see the orange and the vase—beyond that, I am out of it. Mere cleverness must go" (Bookman (3 May 1921); WCP 23).

Cather again confirms her awareness of a cubist technique in writing when she refers to D. H. Lawrence's short stories, Sea and Sardinia and The Woman Who Rode Away, calling his "the language of cubisme" (Sergeant 200). See Duryea, Polly. "Rainwitch Ritual in Cather, Lawrence, and Momaday." Journal of Ethnic Studies 18.2 (Summer 1990): 59-75. For an important comparison of D. H. Lawrence's stories—as well as visuals by Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Laura Gilpin—as they relate to Cather's Southwest images, see H�nnighausen, Lothar. "Landscape with Indians and Saints: The Modernist Discovery of Native and Hispanic Folk-Culture." 36 (Amerikastudien [American Studies: A Quarterly]). M�nchen: Wilhelm Fink Verlag: 329-24.

Art Institute of Chicago. The museum was founded in 1879. The Palmer and Bartlett bequests enabled the Art Institute to assemble a fine collection of nineteenth-century French paintings. The collection includes Portrait of Manet by Fantin-Latour, Monet's Haystacks, C�zanne's Gulf of Marseilles, and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix. The Art Institute of Chicago was Cather's favorite American Museum.

Cather: "This city [Chicago] of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition,—beautiful because the rest was blotted out. She thought of the steps leading down from the Art Museum as perpetually flooded with orange-red sunlight; they had been like that one stormy November afternoon when Sebastian came out of the building at five o'clock and stepped beside one of the bronze lions to turn up the collar of his overcoat, light a cigarette, and look vaguely up and down the avenue before he hailed a cab and drove away" (Lucy Gayheart 136, my italics).

Bakst, L�on (Lev Samoilovich Rosenberg). Russian portrait painter, graphic artist, lecturer, author, and influential set-designer for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; b. Grodno, Russia 1866; d. Paris, 1924. Bakst, who painted Willa Cather's portrait, sat for both Picasso and Modigliani.

In an early story, "The Gold Slipper," Cather paid homage to Bakst's revolutionary impact on the fashions worn by wealthy women, fashions made in the House of Worth which spread to America. Bakst's fabulous costumes became so popular that Paris Couturiers patterned their dresses after them (Pruzhan 25). This fact was pointed out by Cather and confirmed by her character who wore a Worth dress with influence from Bakst. One of his dresses is currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. For Bakst references, see Pruzhan, Irina. L�on Bakst: Set and Costume Designs, Book Illustrations, Paintings and Graphic Works. Trans. Arthur Shkarovski-Raff�. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1988.

Cather: "Today, after we have all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Bakst and the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown without distrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to the well-disposed ("A Gold Slipper." Harper's 134 (Jan. 1917): 166-74 [Crane C50]).

Bakst attended the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in Russia, and later he studied drawing in Paris with the Academician Jean-L�on G�r�me. At the Louvre and the Luxembourg Museums, Bakst admired the paintings of Vel�zquez, Rubens, and the Barbizons, especially those of Corot and Millet. His work even shows the flamboyant influence from Beardsley (Pruzhan 7-8, 10).

Bakst met Sergei Diaghilev while yet in Russia in 1890. After Diaghilev's spectacular 1909 Ballets Russes debut at the Th��tre du Chat�let in Paris, Bakst became the company's leading stage designer. He moved permanently to Paris in 1910 and began his journeys to Italy, Spain, North Africa, and ancient sites in Greece. All of these cultures influenced his dynamic artwork.

In describing his own style, Bakst wrote to a friend that he had a "close relationship with Symbolist writers" (Pruzhan 218). He had adopted the Symbolist's 'correspondances' between the arts—similar to the methods Cather employed in her writing. Consciously he attempted to convey "the mood generated by the music through colour, to interpret in a painterly way the emotional sensuality inherent in the music" (Pruzhan 23).

Art Nouveau, a movement loosely allied with the Symboliste aesthetic then so popular in Paris, affected "not only the visual arts but also art criticism, the theater, music and literature. It set the stage for the flowering of Russian book illustration and largely contributed to the spectacular world-wide triumph of Russian ballet, Russian music, and Russian stage design" (Pruzhan 7-9).

After Cather won the Pulitzer Prize, her Nebraska fans commissioned and paid for a portrait of her for the Omaha Public Library. At first Cather considered both American and French artists, but she finally chose the same L�on Bakst who was in her story, "The Gold Slipper," six years earlier (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Irene Miner Weisz." Aug. 11 [1923]. The Willa Cather Papers. Modern MSS, Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago IL 60610). Judge Duncan M. Vinsonhaler acted as the liaison between Cather and the Omaha Committee. In Paris, she chose the artist, negotiated the price, arranged for the sittings and the specifics of portrait with Bakst during the summer of 1923 (Cather, Willa. "Letter to Judge Vinsonhaler." Letter #005; this letter and the following numbered letters, all from the Willa Cather-Duncan Vinsonhaler Correspondence are held in the Special Collections/Manuscripts, Cl