ANNE ESTELLE RICE (AMERICAN/BRITISH 1877 - 1959)
SOUTH OF FRANCE

mixed media on paper, signed
mounted, framed and under glass

image size 23cm x 29cm, overall size 42cm x 48cm

Note: Rice was an American artist who was one of the chief illustrators for the British periodical Rhythm. In 1905 Rice went to Paris to illustrate the latest fashions for Philadelphia's North American magazine.[4] In the summer of 1907 she met the Scottish painter John Duncan Fergusson who encouraged her to become a painter and with whom she began a relationship. Exposed in Paris to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, she adopted a vivid palette and used red or blue contouring lines. From 1910 she began to use pure primary and secondary colours. After showing her painting The Egyptian Dancers (1910), she was claimed by the American press as the leader of a new school of art. In 1909, Rice was one of three artists invited by American merchant John Wanamaker to provide decorative murals for a new store that he was opening in Philadelphia. To make the work she had to take on a very large studio at 87 rue Denfert-Rochereau in Paris where she worked until the end of 1913 to produce seven panels depicting figures, mostly women, in classical garden settings. Rice's murals were removed when the store was remodelled in the mid-1950s, and were lost, presumed destroyed. During this period, together with Fergusson, S.J. Peploe, and other members of the Fergusson circle, she exhibited at the Ashnur Gallery in Paris. She showed at the Salon d’Automne from 1908 through 1913, and at the Salon des Independents in 1911 and 1912. London's progressive Baillie Gallery gave Rice major exhibitions in 1911 and 1913. Her work was also included in salons of the Allied Artists Association in England. In 1910, in the Café d'Harcourt, boulevard Saint-Michel, Rice and Fergusson met the publisher John Middleton Murry.[8] He introduced them the following year to the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. A lifelong friendship started from then on between Rice and Mansfield, who dedicated her 1912 short story "Ole Underwood" to her friend. Mansfield further expressed her admiration about Rice both as an artist and as a person. In a letter to Murry written in May 1912, she described the painter as "an exceptional woman – so gay, so abundant, in full flower just now" who, "when she is happy and working", "has great personal ‘allure’ – physical ‘allure’." Later, on December 26, 1920, she wrote to Rice: "Whenever I examine things here – the lovely spring line of flowers and peach leaves par exemple, I realise what a marvellous painter you are – the beauty of your line – the life behind it." Moreover, Rice and Fergusson became active collaborators in Murry's literary and arts quarterly Rhythm, in which Mansfield was assistant editor until June 1912. According to arts historian Roger Neill: "The aesthetic concept of "rhythm" – harmony in nature, vigour and directness – provided the connective tissue, not only between two Scottish Colourists (Fergusson and Peploe, plus Rice), but also between the writers and artists involved with the magazine." In 1912, Rice met the American author Theodore Dreiser in Paris and they became intimate friends and correspondents. Also in Paris in 1912 Rice met her future husband, the English art and theatre critic Raymond Drey. She spent August 1913 with J.D. Fergusson in Cassis, in the company of S.J. Peploe, his wife Margaret and their son Willy, but her relationship with Fergusson ended soon afterwards. Late in 1913 she married Drey, and the couple began to make their home in England. The First World War adversely affected Rice: many of the American art dealers and collectors who showed an interest in her work stopped buying pictures.