Janet Payne Bowles
Although the self-taught artisan had little commercial success during her lifetime, she became famous after designing a jewelry collection for actress Maude Adams to wear in a stage production of As You Like It.
Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke and J. P. Morgan commissioned Payne Bowles to make severals pieces of metalwork and jewelry for their collections.
She also wrote book reviews for Modern Art in the early years of her career and contributed articles to The Craftsman in 1904, Handicraft in 1909 and in 1910, and Jewelers' Circular Weekly in 1911.
In 1895, she joined the Portfolio Club, which was an association of area artists, writers, architects, teachers, and musicians who gathered regularly for exhibitions, lectures, and social events.
[7][8] In November 1906, the Bowles family moved to Helicon Hall, part of novelist Upton Sinclair's experimental community on the outskirts of Englewood, New Jersey.
She moved with her children to her hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, in the spring of 1912 and found work as an art teacher at her alma mater, which by that time had been renamed Shortridge High School.
[9] After Payne Bowles's piano was ruined in a housemoving accident during a move to Boston in 1895, she decided to give up a potential career in music to pursue other interests.
"[2] Payne Bowles found this type of work unfulfilling and began to attended seminars in psychology and philosophy at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He was soon arrested and jailed for a plot to overthrow the U.S. government, but Payne Bowles's training in his shop led to her decision to become a metalsmith and jeweler.
[8][12] After a chance meeting with Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1905 to 1910, he commissioned several pieces of her metalwork.
She later claimed to have spent all of her time from 1909 until Morgan's death in 1913 fashioning numerous commissioned pieces for his flatware and jewelry collection from the gold and jewels that he provided.
[8][13] After separating from her husband and returning to Indianapolis with her two children in 1912, Payne Bowles took a position teaching craftwork courses at her alma mater, now called Shortridge High School.
[9][13] Payne Bowles believed in "learning by doing" and championed a spontaneous, rhythmic approach to art that "stressed balance, proportion, rhythm, and function.
She also formed the Art Appreciation Club in 1920 and founded the Workmanship Guild in 1927 at Shortridge High School before retiring from teaching in June 1942 due to ill health.
Although Payne Bowles had little commercial success, she continued to create, exhibit, and sell her work and remained active in the Arts and Crafts movement in the United States.
Art historians Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss commented in their book, Skirting the Issue: Stories of Indiana's Historical Women Artists, that her free-form pieces also showed "a controlled engagement with her medium"[14] Janet Zapata remarked in an American Crafts article published in 1994 that Payne Bowles's work showed "a command of proportion, harmony and balance.
