Clara Jane Stephens

Clara Jane Stephens

Stephens, Clara Jane

Land's End 1877

painter

Northwest artist

Oregon artist

Born near Land's End, England in 1877, Clara Jane Stephens arrived in Portland in 1894. She studied with artist Eva Woolfolk before attending Frank DuMond's and Kenyon Cox's classes at the Art Students League in New York. She continued her art education with a summer course in Italy from William Merritt Chase. Chase painted her portrait and presented it to her as was his custom to honor an outstanding pupil. She was one of the early women to be associated with the Portland Sketch Club, exhibiting there in 1894. She also had an affiliation with the Oregon Artist Association which had an exhibition in 1896 to benefit the Library.

Stephens received an honorable mention at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905 for "her artistic feeling and exquisite coloring." At the time she was teaching at the Portland Academy, a position she held until 1916 when it closed. She was an exhibitor at the Panama Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915. She taught children's classes at the Portland Art Museum in 1916 and joined the faculty of the Museum Art School in 1917, remaining there until her retirement in 1938. An article in the Portland Spectator newspaper included comments on those Saturday Children's Classes: "[they] would eagerly gather under the skillful and intelligent guidance of their beloved teacher, Clara Jane Stephens. Problems, which are fundamental to all good work in arts, are simply and fascinatingly presented." In addition to teaching in the School, she exhibited frequently at the Portland Art Museum starting in 1911. She had one person shows in 1914, 1919, and again in 1926. Oils, watercolors and charcoal drawings, including several Venetian sketches, were described as "full of color and originality."

A devoted teacher, she continued to exhibit her work. In 1920 she was featured in a one person show at the Seattle Art Museum sponsored by the Fine Art Society. Jack O'Lantern Makers received much favorable comment and was widely reproduced. In 1923 she had an exhibition at the Artcraft and Curio Shop on Morrison Street in Portland. Among her landscapes and portraits, a Mt. Hood was singled out because of its unusual color and viewpoint from the upper valley. It was exhibited in 1922 at the Anderson Galleries in New York and also appeared at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in a Society of Independent Artists Exhibition. Stephens was a member of this group.

In 1925 Stephens had an important exhibit in New York at the Ainslie Galleries on Fifth Avenue. A New York review was very favorable and it even impressed French art critic, Comte Chabrier. He submitted a review to his Parisian magazine "modern works without exaggeration, which separate themselves from the ordinary by their sense of color and spiritual realism of (the) person depicted."

News of her acclaim in New York and Paris reached Portland, and the newspapers at home boasted of her acceptance on a national and international level. At this time she won a second award at the Seattle Art Museum and her exhibit on view at the University of Oregon elicited "techniques vary as do subjects ... sometimes smooth strokes, sometimes long, quick (effect of windblown clouds), often short dabs that appear as a mass of color close-up but (is really) the Oregon City Bridge ... when viewed from a distance."

In 1927 she became one of the charter members of the Society of Oregon Artists and exhibited with them in their first annual show. Her piece, Over Mantel, evoked much comment at the time. In 1948 an exhibition at the Frances Webb Galleries in Hollywood, California presented Miss Stephens as "one of the outstanding artists of the Pacific Coast." She never married and died in 1952 as the result of a fall. Highly underrated in recent history, Clara Jane Stephens was one of Oregon's outstanding women painters.

Artist biography reproduced with more