Jane Peterson 

(1876-1965)

Confident, independent, and immensely talented, Jane Peterson excelled in a mostly male-dominated art world. She showed a remarkable ability to absorb a wide variety of flourishing movements such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Art Nouveau, then distilled these into her own very unique style, in both oil and watercolor gouache. Intense travel into Europe and the Middle East early in her career, and study with important figures like Joaquin Sorolla, provided the stimulation for her evolving and maturing style. My exposure to Jane Peterson’s work was very misleading, yet is not an unfamiliar story. After thirty years of freedom to go wherever she chose, she married in 1925 at fifty years of age, and basically from 1925 until her death, her painting was restricted to floral still lifes, which, at the time of her passing, flooded the market with a lot of lesser-quality examples. These are what I saw. It was a decade later that Hirschl & Adler Galleries staged an exhibition focusing only on her pre-1925 work, and I was not ready to fully appreciate her painting; it was perhaps too “modern” for my taste. In 1995, I was introduced to a starting collector through a mutual friend, and the novice collector was seeking advice from me. We attended a Sotheby auction together, where I purchased a Jane Peterson harbor image, and he acquired a good George L. Noyes. Shortly thereafter, we passed the H&A Gallery window filled with Jane Peterson’s paintings from an exhibition opening that day. I guess my “savvy” went up several notches when my new friend compared prices. We are still good friends today, and he has acquired a very respectable collection, while I continue to wish I had understood Jane Peterson better and more quickly than I did.