Fern Isabel Coppedge (American, 1883–1951) Winter Decoration

Exhibited

"One Hundred Thirty-First Annual Exhibition," Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 26-March 1, 1936, no. 142.
National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, New York, New York, January-February, 1937.
Trenton High School, Trenton, New Jersey, April 1937.
"The Philadelphia Ten: A Women's Artist Group 1917-1945, Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 23-March 15, 1998; and Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, May 10-July 19, 1998; and Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, September 25-November 15, 1998; and The Old Jail Museum, Albany, Texas,
January 23-March 20, 1999; and Concord Art Association, Concord, Massachusetts, April 16-June 11, 1999; and James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, July 10-October 3, 1999 (a traveling exhibition).

Literature

Sunday Times, New York, New York 1937.
"The Philadelphia Ten: A Women's Artist Group," in American Art Review, Vol. X, No. 1, January-February 1998, pp. 119 (illustrated).
Page Talbott and Patricia Tanis Sydney, The Philadelphia Ten: A Woman's Artist Group 1917-1945, Galleries at Moore and American Art Review Press, 1998, pp. 77, 89-90, pl. 40 (illustrated p. 77).
Les and Sue Fox, Fern Coppedge 1883-1951: One Woman's Struggle for Equality in the Art World, West Highland Publishing, Cincinnati, 2021, p. 196, no. CWF-77 (illustrated).

Note

Throughout a career of over thirty years, Fern Coppedge became widely celebrated for her colorful winter scenes set in the many villages of Bucks County, where she lived from 1920 onwards, and which she depicted many times over. Winter Decoration is a quintessential work by Fern Coppedge. One of the largest she ever produced, it depicts an iconic view of the village of Lambertville (New Jersey) as seen from New Hope (Pennsylvania). The locale, which Coppedge painted several times in her career, is clearly identifiable via the canal in the foreground, running parallel to the icy Delaware River in the middle ground, and because of the iconic steeple of Lambertville's First Presbyterian Church in the background. Several factory buildings are also recognizable thanks to their distinctive, bold color: the Lear Mill to the left, and the New Jersey Rubber Company to the right (which locals refered to as "Stink Mill"), as well as the Goat Hill Quarry which Garber immortalized several times.

The work combines several of Coppedge's favorite, and hallmarks, subjects (namely the shadow-patterned snow and the bare, tortuous trees which frame the composition) and offers a synthesis of her mid-career style. As she often liked to do in her oils of the same period, Coppedge here introduces a subtle opposition between the old and the new, the pastoral and the modern. On one side, the expanding New Jersey shore is marked by several factory buildings spewing their fumes into the air. On the other however, a quaint Pennsylvanian country-side sits tranquil and frozen in the snow. To accentuate the feeling of a transforming, ever-changing landscape, the artist introduces a soft, vibrating touch at play in the twining plumes of smoke, the lavender-mist sky, and the bold halos of color seen shimmering through the squared-windows of the foreground cottages.

Provenance

Newman Galleries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Acquired directly from the above.

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. William M.B. Fleming, Pennsylvania.

By descent in the family.

Private Collection, Pennsylvania.