Steaming up the Yangtze River under a hail of bullets from rebel soldiers, riding a donkey to the edge of the Mongolian Desert, clambering over the ruins of the fabled lost city of Angkor Wat….not what you would expect for a woman born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1878. But they were the real-life adventures of artist and lecturer Lucille Sinclair Douglass.
How she went from a lonely childhood in rural Alabama to become a world traveler and one of America’s foremost women painter-etchers is a story of determination, dedication, and repeated self-invention. Instead of following the traditional path laid out for women at the turn of the 20th century–marriage and motherhood–Douglass broke her engagement to a young law student and began working to support herself by painting china and teaching the art to others.
Defying the odds, she turned that feminine past-time of china painting and her talent with pencil, paint, and pastels into a career that took her through war-torn China and to Angkor Wat. From these experiences came the art that won her an international reputation. Her etchings of Chinese and Southeast Asian subjects are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Acadia University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Georgetown University. The Angkor Wat etchings, exhibited at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.
In her own day, Douglass represented the modern New Woman, who demanded the same opportunities men enjoyed–above all, the freedom to choose her own destiny. Her work as an artist–and her gregarious, charismatic personality–opened doors that expanded her professional and personal horizons and eventually made her a minor celebrity in America.
Less than a decade after her death, she was largely forgotten, a victim of changing tastes and trends and of a male-dominated canon. As that canon undergoes reconsideration, recognizing the achievements of women artists like Douglass restores depth and richness to the story of art in America.
