Lillian Genth

In about 30 years Genth appeared in 233 exhibitions, and while well renowned for her paintings while alive, her story and artwork have been lost in the retelling of American art history.

[1] Lillian Mathilde Genth was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Matilda Caroline Rebscher and Samuel Adam.

She received the William L. Elkins European fellowship for attainment in art from the Philadelphia School of Design, which sponsored her to paint in Europe for a year.

During one of Whistler’s visits to the school in 1900, he was so impressed by Genth’s work that he gave her a paint palette; an honor that she used and treasured for the rest of her career.

Also in 1904 Genth received the Mary Shaw Prize for the best landscape in the show for her work Peasant Houses, Normandy at an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

In Brittany, one day I took a model out and posed her in the open and I was at once filled with resentment at all the beauty I had been missing.”[2] The conservative Victorian society was not ready to accept Genth’s nude figures and at first her paintings were often rejected by exhibitions and advisors told her to abandon her new iconography.

In 1908 her painting, The Lark, won her the Shaw Memorial Prize at the 83rd Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design.

She split her time between her two residences; one is an apartment in New York City, and the other is a large estate in the Berkshire Mountains in Connecticut, which she named Hermitcliff.

Her paintings from this time show her passion and admiration for Spanish culture and include images of powerful women.

[2] One of her most famous paintings from this time is Las Abanicas, which depicts four women in brightly colored garments participating in the Seville Fair, a festival in Sevilla, Spain.

Another aspect of Spanish culture that intrigued Genth was bullfighting and she created two notable paintings surrounding this theme: La Novia del Torero and Bull Fight.

[4] In 1931 Genth returned from a trip to Asia and announced that she would cease painting European and African subjects and focus on the Orient.

[2] Genth’s favorite stop in Asia was Papua because the island was very remote and fairly untouched by outsiders; a ship had not landed there in over four years.

[2] In Papua she painted Papuan Wedding (Port Morsby), which captures a vibrant marriage ceremony with strokes of earth tones.

In her later years she was driven to upstate New York every fall to witness the leaves change and painted small landscape sketches.