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Alice Acheson (1895-1996) Noted Artist

Alice Stanley Acheson was an impressionistic artist, wife and diplomatic partner to Dean Acheson, Secretary of State during the Truman Administration, and a tall elegant woman who could wear cutting edge fashion to all the momentous diplomatic dinners and cocktail parties.

Acheson's art career came with two sides of fame, one side included access to the fine art world, the other side included the need to be careful not to take advantage of her political notoriety within the United States and the world.  She was born in Charlevoix, MI, into an artistic family.  Her mother, Jane Stanley was a self-trained watercolorist that documented her world travels with stunning precision, and her grandfather was the John Mix Stanley, the renown painter who painted Native Americans on the western frontier.  John Stanley's work is included in numerous museums including the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Gene Autry Museum, and Acheson's hometown museum, the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Acheson studied art at Wellesley and ended up by marrying Dean Acheson shortly before graduation.  She continued to prefect her craft over the years at the Boston School of Fine Arts and Design, and the Corcoran School of Art.  During long periods of her life she spend the mornings paintings in upper floor studio of her Georgetown home.  Her work was shown in New York's Wildenstein Gallery and Washington's Franz Bader Gallery.  Today, you will find her work in the collections of the Phillips, Hirshhorn, and the Butler Museum of American Art.  Her work is also in the State Department's Art in Embassies collection.

Acheson was an active member of the National Association of Watercolor Artists as well as other art societies in Washington and New York.  She was represented by Franz Bader Gallery in the Nation's Capitol, but had exhibits at the Corcoran Museum of Art, and in New York galleries: Argent, Wildenstein, and Maynard Walker.         

While Acheson has been gone since 1966, her work continues to surface in exhibits.  Her watercolor, Mountains from La Quinta, 1975, went on tour as part of a Smithsonian Traveling Exhibit, called Art of Our Time, 1992.  A painting of  two small African American girls, entitled Walking Home was featured in a calendar put out by the now defunct Museum of African American Art, Tampa, 1995.

In the watercolor below:  Cathedral with Pink Dogwoods, celebrates loose brush stokes, the pink blossoms on the trees comes across as cotton candy wrapped around the blooming limbs and branches.  Still, other trees in the middle of the composition are barren waiting for their leaves to spring forth.  The cathedral tower pokes out over the treetops and in between the spring blossoms we see the faint structure of the house of worship.  At the base of the composition we a brilliant green stripe of grass beckoning us to believe that another new season has begun.  Her work in this case mirrors Maurice Prendergast's impressionistic paint blobs, where each blob takes on a form that creates the composition.    


Cathedral with Pink Flowering Dogwood
Watercolor on Paper
Signed LL:  Alice Acheson



References:

  • Washington Post, Jan. 1966, Obituary by Martin Weil
  • U.S. Department of State - Art in Embassies, Alice Acheson 
  • Who was Who in American Art, Peter Hastings Falk
  • Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, 1992
  • Several internet sites


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